Three years ago on June 22nd, American comedian, social critic, actor and author George Carlin died at the age of 71 from heart failure at a Santa Monica, CA hospital. He had a wickedly twisted yet objective take on life, politics, religion, and the English language. He understood the darker side of human nature and was always ready to explain life to his audiences from his uniquely critical perspective.
Carlin’s humor fell under 3 areas: observational humor, social commentary, and the peculiarities of the English language – all generally focusing on “humanity’s b*ll-sh*t.” He often mixed all three types of humor in the same skit – in an explicitly nihilistic manner. His comedy covered U.S. culture, national obsessions with fame and celebrity, extreme consumerism, corporate control, religion, child raising, blind patriotism, sexual taboos, and political alienation.
Carlin won 5 Grammy Awards for his comedy albums. He produced 14 stand-up comedy specials for HBO starting in 1977 and ending in 2008. He was most proud of his 5 books, totaling almost a million in book sales over his 40-year entertainment career. He had 2 more books published posthumously in 2009. His “seven dirty words” skit went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978 wherein the Court stated the FCC had the power to regulate indecent material on public airwaves.
Carlin was the first-ever host of Saturday Night Live on 10/11/75 – the only episode in which the host had no involvement (at his request) in sketches. He also hosted SNL on November 10, 1984 and appeared in several sketches.
Carlin’s humor skewered conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats. He readily pointed out the self-serving hypocrisy of most politicians. He claimed he did not vote and often criticized U.S. elections as mere illusions of choice. He said he last voted in 1972.
Carlin enjoyed a type of natural schadenfreude in observing the rich spectrum of humanity slowly self-destruct of its own design. He said “When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.”
Carlin was prescient and prophetic at times. He accurately saw the worst in human nature and was not afraid to tell dismal truths about our society. One of his rants from about 10 years ago is the following transcription of an HBO special that is also available on several YouTube clips. Read, laugh and weep.
There’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that will never, ever, ever, be fixed…It’s never gonna get any better!
Don’t look for it! Be happy with what you’ve got!
I’m talking about the real owners now, the big… the wealthy…The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t.
You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations.
They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.
They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want.
Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that! That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting f**k*d by a system that threw them overboard 30 f**k**g years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers – Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your f**k**g retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.
And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this f**k**g place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club that used to beat you over the head with all day long and they tell you what to believe…All day long, beating you over the head in the media, what to believe, what to think and what to buy…
The table is tilted, folks! The game is rigged! And nobody seems to notice, and nobody seems to care! Good honest, hard-working people! White collar, blue collar… Doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on! Good honest, hard-working people continue…These are people of modest means! …continue to elect these rich c*ck-s*ckers who don’t give a f**k about them!
They don’t give a f**k about you! They don’t care about you! At all! At all!
Happily submitted by Marc Pascal from Phoenix, Arizona.