Anyone who's followed him throughout the decades knew what a cynical phony he was and how carefully crafted his image was.
Plus, he was an angry, bitter nihilist, misanthrope and hypocrite. My favorite line was, "They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it..." all the while enjoying the benefits of upward mobility and being able to bash religion without getting excommunicated, jailed or executed.
Humor is subjective...collect yourself and try again
shareOh, this is absolutely rich. Coming from someone who has constantly tried to accuse me of having no sense of humor at all. Fake-o!
shareExplain yourself
Cop out
Hah, what's to explain ? It's just another straightforward opinion of mine you can't handle.
shareOr...It's just another lonely old boy drunk on his porch opinion you can't explain:)
shareYou're just a jealous slug because I once posted I've been a lifelong athlete (and you don't have one athletic muscle in your body) and did a lot of heavy construction in my younger days.
You drag your lard ass home from your desk job in the rat race, sequester yourself in your garage, get drunk, smoke up a storm and all you've got to look forward to is trying to be king shit in a stagnant discussion forum.
You're too easy to read , doofus.
Struck a nerve did I😁
shareNyuk, nyuk! More pretentiousness. Ho-hum.
shareYou're still using your big boy words wrong😉
shareBut unlike you, I don't have to lug a thesaurus around.
shareOuch, you really told me there sport😬
shareSport is a really weird word coming from you, jealous porker, lol.
shareHa!
Angry nonsense from a lonely crank that listens to the neighbor's kids...😳
So, you don't like the sounds of happy children playing and you like to bully women. Got it.
You posted this yourself to Rio genius...'What does gender have to do with it?'
You contradict yourself and lean on 'working class hero' nonsense ('I lived a life of courage,' 'I was a scrapper,' 'I was in construction,' I am like 'Jeremiah Johnson...'
And stop being a broken down old crybaby with the 'bully' stuff, this isn't high school where I'm sure you were some great scrappy tough guy in gym class as per another thread🙄
Mina posted her mess and she will hear about it
But Carlin didn't do comedy. He gave opinions. This is another reason why I dislike him. He jumpstarted this trend of comedians just giving their opinions onstage but being seen as "doing comedy". That's not what comedy has ever been about.
shareTell that to thousands of people that laughed at his routines
Honestly, you seem humorless and boring
Millions of people laugh at PewDiePie and Logan Paul. What's your point?
shareWho are they, shit-stirrer?
That's my point
I'm putting you on ignore. Have a nice day.
shareAh, the ignore feature... the shield of the crybaby😁
shareIt’s the Naughty Step for you, lol.
shareOh Nos!!!
Now I'm being bullied on the interthingy😭
Hey, you’re the bully here. You made me swim all the way to Ireland. I’ve had to sit and drink Guinness because of you.
shareHa! Don't think we’ve forgotten your Pistols at Dawn comment. What did Dawn ever do to you?
shareThe only Dawn I know is this one: -
https://youtu.be/_dggAQk5peA
Great little ditty
They just don't build hair and mustaches like that anymore!
" It's all bullshit folks." George Carlin spoke the truth, but he didn't speak all of the truth. People who do that don't live long.
I take your point about nihilism though. Carlin was a poster boy for the damaging effects of despair through alcohol and drug abuse and the toll it took on his health.
He thought everything was bullshit...because that's how nihilists think. When life fails them, they proceed to call everything crap (life, love, romance, society, religion, etc.) and try to convince everyone as to the same. If he'd been happily married with a large number of doting grand kids to adore him or just lived happily to old age with a best friend (like Carl Reiner did with Mel Brooks), his entire outlook would've been different.
I don't think his substance abuse had much to do with his bitterness. He seemed to be one of those people that took everything personally. He went to his grave bitterly ranting about an encounter he had as a child with Danny Kaye that must have happened 50 years before. That's not drugs and alcohol talking but a personality type. A lot of comedians went through worse and didn't turn out bitter and angry like him. Richard Pryor was supposedly the nicest comic anyone had ever met behind the scenes, and that guy went through everything.
He thought everything was bullshit...
No you are wrong about that. He was specifically talking about the mainstream media when he said it was all bullshit not life in general.
Otherwise some people seem to be able to reconcile themselves with being assimilated and becoming part of the problem ( that is the Borg ) where other people struggle with it.
His early comedy was brilliant in its surrealism. I read a few of his books, and they were similarly full of clever wordplay, and funny observations about the absurdity of life. His books really were quite unlike his stage comedy.
But, yeah, in the last decade, maybe two, of his life his stage comedy was nothing more than him bitchin' about life in general and politics in particular. There wasn't anything actually funny about it... just his I'm-old-and-I-don't-give-a-shit anymore commentary. He sounded no different from my crusty father-in-law.
Ironically, a lot of his commentary was about insulting his audience. Sure he used the 3rd person to disguise the fact, but he was generally complaining about how "people" -- i.e. his audience -- were just sheeple, too stupid to realize how they were being abused and farmed by the system, politicians, etc.
People in the audience clapped and laughed along, more or less, confirming his observations in real time.
He got old... I wouldn't be surprised to learn he struggled with depression.
I remember when Lenny Bruce was on trial for talking dirty onstage. His self-indulgent reaction was to read the complete transcript of that day’s hearing, verbatim, to his nightclub audience. It was dry as sand, but the audiences laughed and applauded as if it were gold. Carlin wasn’t the first asshat to get people to fool themselves.
Don’t get me started on Bob “I never met a war I didn’t like” Hope
. . . .
He was before my time, but I remember hearing Lenny Bruce for the first time in art class decades ago. A model brought in a tape to listen to as we were painting him. He was chuckling to himself the entire time but I just didn't get it. Bruce was just rambling about everything in the same way a local character at the neighborhood bar would, but I guess he was seen as cool because he was talking and acting like what they used to call a "hep cat" (jazzy, cool Beatnik type), and people had never seen that before. Comedians at that time were all conventional, buttoned up "squares," and I think that's what attracted people to him. He was the first non-square comic. But did that make him funny, though? In my opinion, not really.
shareSpot on, Mina. There was another, genuinely funny guy who got his start in the 60s, with whom you may be familiar because he went on to have considerable success in his own TV sitcoms: Bob Newhart. Bob started out in standup, and the title of one of his phonograph (remember those?) albums was The Buttoned-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. I never found Lenny Bruce funny. He died from a heroin overdose, which, as someone said of Elvis when he died, was a “good career move.” So Bruce built a cult. Carlin, to me, was tantamount to brilliant from the 60s to the 80s, and then he wasn’t.
shareNot only am I fully aware of Newhart's standup, I also know that Shelley Berman reportedly hated his guts for supposedly "stealing" his act. But c'mon, didn't everyone do that talking-on-the-telephone bit back in those days? I can remember at least three acts from the 1960s that did it!
shareEvery comic in the biz accused Milton Berle of stealing their stuff! Yeah, theft (real or imagined) is rampant among comics. I’m curious if you watched the HBO series, I’m Dying Up Here? If so, what did you think? I thought it was overall quite good.
You must’ve noticed how many violent terms comics associate with their (our?) work: dying, killing it, slaying’ ‘em. It’s an anxiety-driven, antagonistic environment, pumped full of tension, depression and indescribable exhilaration when it goes right. Normal people don’t pick up that mic, or that pen.
I remember hearing about Milton Berle being the biggest joke thief in comedy until Robin Williams and later Amy Schumer came along.
I think comics use those terms because doing very badly in front of an audience can feel so horribly that you want to practically commit suicide in embarrassment or hope to die right then and there (as in, "I wish a hole had opened up and swallow me.") So, they make light of that "I could positively die" feeling with "I killed" or "I died onstage."
I didn’t know about Williams stealing stuff, but I’m not surprised. I never paid much attention to him. He had really bad energy around him. That was all I needed to know about him. I actively avoid Schumer. She is inexcusably and inexplicably smug and self-satisfied. She’s like a millennial working in the cell phone department at Best Buy.
shareMort sahl was the first
shareI was not a fan
shareNot at all. He was a comic genius.
share