George Carlin

For comedy fans in America, George Carlin needs no introduction. However, if you live outside of the United States, you might need a bit more prompting (you know Rufus out of Bill & Teds Excellent Adventure?). Whatever the case, George Carlin is without a doubt one of the single most enduring voices in comedy.

Since 1958, Carlin has been stirring up the shit and pissing off both sides of the political spectrum, not to mention all of the little special interest groups that they cater to.

Carlin began his career in comedy in 1958 following a short stint on radio, and was originally part of a double act with Jack Burns, which caught the attention and approval of several of their contemporaries, including Lenny Bruce. After splitting with Burns, Carlin continued the same comedic style, doing characters and sketches alongside slightly irreverant and topical stand up. He soon became very popular in the mainstream, appearing on Ed Sullivan, The Tonight Show and in several mainstream white nightclubs.

Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1970s Carlin's act began to develop into much more outspoken social satire. He was fired for using the word "shit" in several nightclubs and in 1970 at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club, his career took a dramatic turn. Sporting long hair plus beard, Carlin went out on stage and talked to the audience about the Vietnam War and his feelings on it. The crowd quickly became hostile shouting things like "No wonder our colleges are in trouble if they're full of people like you," and "What do you know about Vietnam? You've never been shot at." Carlin retorted and was soon driven from the stage to his motel room, where he was fired and given advice to leave because the Lake Geneva Club could not guarantee his safety.

From that one moment, a more honest (and funnier) George Carlin emerged. Although genius was always inside Carlin, his new found liberation meant that he no longer felt obligated to hold back and take the conventional approach to comedy.

With a new audience of young people becoming interested in Carlin's act, he concentrated mainly on underground clubs and occasional "live" venue performance. Carlin's first albums after going counterculture included FM & AM, Class Clown and Occupation: Foole. All went gold and played a large role in changing the focus of American stand up comedy for a long time to come.

One of Carlin's most controversial bits came from the Class Clown album, almost tame by todays standards, "Seven words you can never say on television" was daring and outspoken at the time. As a result the seven dirty words (shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits) found their way into FCC regulations as the "forbidden words" following a complaint to the commission after a radio station played the track. Carlin was also arrested in Milwaukee for doing this routine.

Carlin hosted the first ever Saturday Night Live show in 1975, where he ad libbed material on God and religion, causing the supposedly "hip, young, cutting edge" producers of the show to have a shit fit.

By the late 1970s, comedians were almost abusing the freedom that Carlin and other early pioneers had helped them gain. Comedian's acts were being loaded with as many of the seven dirty words as possible and it seemed that an audience didn't laugh at a comedian unless he used the words and said something about the President. Mainstream audiences tend to be fickle and laugh at things that aren't funny a lot of the time and as a result, whilst never really changing, Carlin's mainstream appeal dropped going into the nightmare Reagan 1980s. A five year cocaine habit and problems with the Internal Revnue Service didn't help him either.

In 1982, Carlin bounced back with his first album in five years, A Place For My Stuff, the only Carlin album to involve both stand up and studio recorded sketches. A gradual subtle change from the laid back 1970s Carlin, saw the emergance the new 1980s Carlin. Slowly over the course of the 1980s, the decade of republicans and ridiculous social trends, Carlin's material gradually grew angrier, more bitter and darker than ever before. By the time of his 1990 album, Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics, the angry, modern day Carlin had completed the metamorphosis and achieved full flight.

As a result Carlin spent the decade of the 1990s doing (by his own admission) the best work of his career. 1992's Jammin' In New York album and HBO Special was nominated for, and received several awards. According to Carlin it was the best writing and performing he'd ever done (he amended that in 1996 following the Back In Town album saying that it had topped the previous album). Carlin finished the decade by releasing You Are All Diseased in 1999, the most recent, darkest and angriest album yet. Carlin also appeared in several films during the 1990s (one of his most recent appearances was in Kevin Smith's Dogma) and had his own sitcom (The George Carlin Show) airing on Fox during 1994 in the prime time slot following The Simpsons. The sitcom experience resulted in Carlin running into network censors all over again when they bleeped the word "fuck" out of an episode. Carlin argued that the beep only draws more attention to the word.

Considering Carlin's risque and explicit material (especially in recent years), the lack of complaints his material receives compared to comics doing similar types of things is suprising. His material, performance style and delivery don't warrant any. What they do warrant is plenty of respect as the greatest comic of our time. Whether it's the gentle laid back tone of the 1970s or the bitter ligusitic fireworks in modern times, a few things remain constant in Carlin's work. His ability to create new material (sometimes using previous material in different contexts, chopping and mixing together different bits akin to the compositional skills of any musican), to never to lose sight of his most basic concern (to be funny) and of course to say what everyone is thinking but is either afraid to admit or say, puts him first in the DoN'T FoRGeT YouR PUBES top 100 comedians.

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