IN CONCERT: George Carlin

I saw George Carlin at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas last month. And it's taken me a while to get around to writing about it. The basic story is: I enjoyed it a great deal, I laughed a lot, I was thrilled to see my favorite comedian in concert. But he didn't really do an awful lot to merit my positive reaction.

George Carlin is one of my personal heroes. He's been using his comedy to tear apart hypocrisy in religion, politics, race, class, and language itself since before I was born. I've always admired his humor, his honesty, his integrity*, his insight, and even his anger. I admired the way he used his anger to craft scathing indictments** of those in power, the way he focused his rage into productively destructive comedy routines about the ignorant, the greedy, the insincere.

But in the past few years, the anger has seemed to swallow him. His comedy routines have become more and more centered around relishing the pain and suffering of others. His enjoyment of other people's misery and death seems to have become a staple of his act. And it's outrageous, what he says, it's shocking, and it still makes you laugh, startled laughter borne of sheer jaw-dropping amazement at his gall to make punchlines out of, say, terminal diseases, or various methods of suicide.

And I did laugh. Hell, I might've laughed more than anyone else in the theater; there were a number of long, awkward stretches with only scattered nervous chuckles. He was relentless, both in his choice of material and his delivery style -- machine-gunning his words at the audience, a rapid-fire barrage of speech that was magnificent to behold. Whatever quibbles I may express about him, whatever anyone may say about him, there is no question that he is a master craftsman, who has honed the tools of his comedy to razor sharpness, and he is a brilliant artist with the English language, constructing and deconstructing it in a dizzying fashion, using it as a teaching instrument and a weapon. For that alone, I am truly grateful to have seen him live. (He was clearly still developing this particular act, though -- he even told us he was working out routines for his next HBO special; at several points, he referred to written notes, though he never broke stride in his delivery.)

But, as I was saying about his material -- I began to wonder if he even wanted to make us laugh, or if he thought it would be even funnier to make us uncomfortable. I have an angry streak and a pretty sick sense of humor, so I was with him pretty much the whole way. But there were a number of people around me who were clearly discomfited by his dwelling on the death tolls of serial killers or natural disasters, people who probably were expecting him still to be talking about the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television". Saying "piss" doesn't shock anyone anymore. Saying you sincerely hope the planet is struck by a meteor does.

But as crazy and outrageous and shocking as he wanted to be -- and he was all those things, to me, and to everyone else in the audience, judging from their reactions -- he also often seemed to be going through the motions. Like he just decided, "This death obsession thing is working, I'm gonna run with it." His bit about the methods of suicide, for example, just seemed to go on forever. I could feel some of the audience slipping away: "Uh-huh, uh-huh, ropes are better than guns... that's kind of funny, in a sick way, but isn't he going to talk about how you can't say 'shit' on TV?" I mean, death isn't all he talked about; he hit on a lot of topics. But at the end, it's the death stuff that sticks with you.

I laughed, but after the show, I wondered if he had really earned those laughs, if I hadn't heard all this same anger before. Because his anger has developed through the years, cycling through targets, growing in scale, and his comedy has developed with it. Until he finally seemed to reach this critical mass of anger a few years ago, when he started hating the human race as a whole, and not just particular people in it. He just seemed to decide no group or groups of people were the problem, humanity was the problem. And he started wishing death to everyone. And where does his anger -- and his comedy -- go from there?

His comedy has gone through two quantum leaps in his career; once, around '69 or '70, from the Ed Sullivan-appearing, tie-wearing straight to the long-haired, foul-mouthed hippie, and once, early-to-mid-'90s, I'd say, from worn-out hippie to revitalized elder statesman, re-energized and refilled with vim and vigor, piss and vinegar. (Possibly that had something to do with getting the IRS off his back -- refer to the link in my first footnote below.) If he's going to remain a viable voice, I think his comedy needs to grow yet again, beyond this rut of death and destruction he's in.

There is no greater comedian in the world than George Carlin. I could not believe that more firmly. In fact, in my eyes, there has never been a greater comedian. Some will argue and suggest Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman, Bob Saget***, and obviously they're all super-geniuses, giants in comedy and in the world at large. But for me, for my personality, for my sense of humor, for my love of the language, and yes, for my anger, there's only George Carlin. And I believe he can continue to stay on top for years to come. But not if he continues in the same vein as his current act.

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*Let's just pretend he never made those 10-10-220 commercials. And if you can't pretend, here's his reasoning on why he did those commercials, in an interview conducted with a financial website, of all things.
**Is there any other kind of indictment?
*** That's a typo. I meant Dave Coulier.