Akkam’s Razor

George Carlin is dead.  In his own words:

I’m getting old. And it’s okay. Because thanks to our fear of death in this country I won’t have to die. I’ll pass away. Or I’ll expire, like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital they’ll call it a terminal episode. The insurance company will refer to it as negative patient care outcome.

I agree that he wouldn’t want to be eulogized, so instead reminisce at some of his bits (with more here with some memorable quotations).

I hadn’t realized that much of what he was famous for occurred before I was born, but the comedy I consumed was very much influenced by him, from Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams (after we got cable in the mid-1980s), through Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay, Morton Downey, Jr., and Howard Stern.

A purist might say Lenny Bruce did it first and paid with his life, but Carlin carried his persona through adulthood into seniorhood, never having sold-out and actually transforming some of his schtick into wisdom.  Those seven dirty words [wiki] are still important, and the conversation on obscenties and censorship goes on to this day.  I can’t wait to see what happens to this chart after todays stats get rolled in.   In any case, despite being only a high-school graduate, he was far wiser than many could hope to be, and more relavent than ever:

“You can’t be afraid of words that speak the truth. I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms or euphemistic language. And American english is loaded with euphemisms. Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets worse with every generation. For some reason it just keeps getting worse.

There are come bits linked from WFMU’s Beware of the Blog as well as a YouTube channel created by meesterm0le.

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