Hagiography for the Hostile

George Carlin died of heart failure Sunday in Santa Monica, California. He fucking mattered.

Our last true living link to the time of revolutionaries like Bruce and Pryor, he possessed a decidedly more intellectual lean than either yet possessed neither man’s trappings of lifestyles. We seem prone, in our least optimistic times, to ask what could have been but for Bruce’s casual-turned-consuming drug use (a predictable result of the naïve Beats’ junk affectation and, arguably, listening to jazz) or Pryor’s surprising expiration at the age of 65 (the inevitable result of such prolonged use of heavy narcotics and, arguably, those movies with Gene Wilder.) We had such a relic among us for all those years, and a man who stayed long enough to see more than one boundary to push in a lifetime. Of all the icons to inspire so many generations of comedy writers, Carlin seems the most immediately traceable to our modern “alternative” sensibilities, and he can also be remembered as a life lived in example to his philosophical descendants.

In all these ensuing decades of hack pun-smiths and observational retreaders coming to typify our expectation of comedians, Carlin’s routines were not only as clever and utterly original those years ago, but remarkable in their acuity and economy even today, defining a style truly unique from his peers and imitators. At his best (and he was always at his best, right up through his final performance just one week before his passing) he could proudly call himself the finest bullshit detector we’ve ever had, and to George Carlin that was a responsibility. Where imitation has lead so many to comics to (lucrative) mediocrity bereft of legitimately dangerous insight, Carlin never lost his edge or his nerve. Equal parts performance artist and dedicated semanticist, he remained every bit as attuned and committed to his roles as Andy Kauffman or Umberto Ecco. The vanguard of all enemies of the status quo, Carlin spent a career in our invented social covenant of language and put our skeletons out to bleach in the sun. His methods of subversion were both novel and precise, and his most memorable works sprang not only from the absurdities of the things we’ve experienced, but the very ways in which we talk about them.

But contrary to what many of us would like to think, commentary isn’t always activism. You have to earn the distinction of having ever changed anything, and Carlin won his bona fides many times over. A dirty, pierced long-hair in the button-downed entertainment industry of the 60s and 70s, one of the only outspoken atheists to remain in the public eye through the “moral majority” uprising of the 80s (and again in the 2000s), and a vital source of anti-institutionalism through the new century, he can be pointed to as someone who has definitively and profoundly altered not only popular culture, but the nature of American public discourse as well. And, of course, Carlin also has a badge of honor that none of whom we consider “edgy” comics today ever will- his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” bit was so damned good it was played before the justices of United States Supreme Court.

In recent years we’ve seen the departures of the only voices of dissent to have ever made any difference: Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, and now perhaps our last great critic of convention, all in an era when we need them at their most volatile in an all-too urgent way. We’ve spent so long in numbing self-delusion that his clarity of vision could only be called miraculous, and his willingness to share it was among the closest things I’ve ever known to a promise of redemption that I could believe in. Before the official canonization, let me declare his nomination here: in our shared cultural mythology, George Carlin is our saint of words.

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