Monday, Lafayette, Indiana

Among the names that are most recognized and remembered in modern standup comedy, George Carlin is on anyone’s short list. A performer for a half decade, Carlin began in the Ed Sullivan era as part of a comedy team and went on to become one of the great observational monologists in America. He was a brilliant writer and stage performer.

Over the years, especially through the iconoclastic 1960’s Carlin’s comedy material became edgier and increasingly profane. In fact, he is probably most responsible for unleashing a generation of standup comedians who have thrived in nightclubs and on cable television whose routines were peppered with foul language and graphic sexual references. This trend originated with Lenny Bruce, whose routines in the early 1960’s crossed accepted barriers of public language and was arrested for obscenity on more than one occasion. Carlin picked up the mantle testing the boundaries of free speech and was himself arrested for doing a routine entitled “The Seven Words You Cannot Say On Television.” And with that he became as infamous as he was famous.

While I understand the temptation to use rough language and imagery in standup comedy in the rough environment of nightclubs, I have never enjoyed hearing blue language in standup, especially when its use is gratuitous. New comedians, struggling to survive on stage in front of often drunk, hostile audiences frequently resort to rough language and sexual topics to cope. But once past the initial learning phases, I am turned off by stand ups who swear unnecessarily (dropping the “f bomb” as an adjective, for instance). George Carlin was a mixed bag on this criteria.

George Carlin’s was the voice of a man on a mission about public speech and the liberty that must be provided to anyone commenting, regardless of how it might offend some people. But as he got older he became less a comic and more the lecturer - and an angry one at that. As much as I enjoyed him earlier in his career George Carlin lost me near the end.