A Eulogy for George Carlin

Perhaps my favorite George Carlin routine was his rant on “stuff.” As was often the case in his routines, he starts by alerting his audience to the absurdity of something and then, in a torrent of repetitions and distinctions, overwhelms you. By the end, he exhausts the word… and sometimes you.

Others are more qualified to address Carlin’s “process”—I don’t know how he rehearsed or how much—but so much of Carlin’s manic energy was magic. No one will ever equal him in the humor of lists—seven was an absolute minimum for George Carlin. He let the lists rain down, and his timing was so masterful he sometimes seemed a shaman. His quirky dance seduced you, and his endless renovations and innovations on a theme became a sort of conversion.

The job description “comedian” never fit him well. More accurately he was a satirist, his true business covert. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, Carlin presented a mirror where people might see everyone’s face except their own. As indirect as his blows could be, he hit hard. At some point, the universal “you” changed into the personal you. The “you” that initially included Carlin sometimes didn’t in the end. The audience lay on the pyre.

As a satirist, Carlin was an equal opportunity offender. No spectator survived the evening without feeling targeted at least once. Watching George Carlin—especially late in his career—I sometimes laughed, sometimes felt defensive, and sometimes argued back at the screen.

He hid less near the end. At times his bitterness was explicit. But Carlin’s rift on “stuff” finds him in wiliest form. He never uses the word “materialism” as he targets Americans’ materialism and our belief that happiness is just a thing away. “That’s the whole meaning of life,” Carlin crows, “trying to find a place to put your stuff.” We organize our lives around “stuff.” We build houses—really “piles of stuff with covers on them”—to protect our stuff and buy new homes so we can buy more stuff. We travel with stuff, resent other’s stuff, and worry which stuff should be with us at all times.

Carlin was hardly the first person to insult us so. In Walden, Thoreau wrote that our possessions possess us. Thoreau famously said, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.” As we accrete stuff, Thoreau argued, we give up freedom and flexibility in proportion. Worse, we become accustomed to our diet of excess until it takes more and more to feed us. In this matter, as in many others, Thoreau proved prophetic.

But Thoreau wasn’t funny. He was a scolder, a proud party pooper, and, where Thoreau revels in hyperbole and spleen, Carlin could draw people in before springing a trap. He could be late because he was looking for a place for his own stuff. He didn’t start out, as Thoreau did, playing the exception. In the end, he obviously wasn’t.

Sure, Carlin had a Thoreauvian guise too. In his bitterest work, he attacked openly, and some critics slammed his later work as dour and, particularly damningly, preachy, not funny. Yet, while some of his routines did amount to, “People are so full of shit,” you knew he was willing to exempt you during the performance, as long as you didn’t exempt yourself afterward.

And he always made me laugh—he was certainly more funny than Henry David. I will miss him. The world needs Carlins as much as it needs Thoreaus.