For those you may of missed it...he was awesome and he will be sorely missed.
Comedian George Carlin mourned
LOS ANGELES - Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. Some People Are Stupid. Stuff. People I Can Do Without.
George Carlin, who died of heart failure Sunday at 71, leaves behind
not only a series of memorable routines, but a legal legacy: His most
celebrated monologue, a frantic, informed riff on those infamous seven
words, led to a Supreme Court decision on broadcasting offensive
language.
The counterculture hero's jokes also targeted things such as misplaced
shame, religious hypocrisy and linguistic quirks - why, he once asked,
do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?
Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health
Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain
and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had
performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel
in Las Vegas.
"He was a genius and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the
other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The
Associated Press.
The actor Ben Stiller called Carlin "a hugely influential force in
stand-up comedy. He had an amazing mind, and his humour was brave, and
always challenging us to look at ourselves and question our belief
systems, while being incredibly entertaining. He was one of the
greats." Carlin constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and
language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" - all of
which are taboo on broadcast TV to this day.
When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was
arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and
exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was
indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.
When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they
resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's
authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language
during hours when children might be listening.
"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm
perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this
year.
Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a
television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "Saturday
Night Live" debut in 1975 - noting on his Web site that he was "loaded
on cocaine all week long" - and appearing some 130 times on "The
Tonight Show."
He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a few TV
shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to
"Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 - a testament to his range
from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness
(sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).
"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"
In one of his most famous routines, Carlin railed against euphemisms he
said have become so widespread that no one can simply "die."
"'Older' sounds a little better than 'old,' doesn't it?," he said.
"Sounds like it might even last a little longer. ... I'm getting old.
And it's OK. 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.' And if it's the result of malpractice they'll say it was
a 'therapeutic misadventure."'
Carlin won four Grammy Awards for best spoken comedy album and was
nominated for five Emmys. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was
being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor,
which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.
"Nobody was funnier than George Carlin," said Judd Apatow, director of
recent hit comedies such as "Knocked Up" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin."
"I spent half my childhood in my room listening to his records
experiencing pure joy. And he was as kind as he was funny."
Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a
coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and
movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, "George was fairly
conservative when I met him," said Burns, describing himself as the
more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would
reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in
the early '60s.
"We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both
blown away," Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the
end for their collaboration (though not their close friendship). "It
was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't
exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a
different direction."
That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and
philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.
"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all
of these things - bad language and whatever - it's all caused by one
basic thing, and that is: religious superstition," Carlin told the AP
in a 2004 interview. "There's an idea that the human body is somehow
evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and
bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the
attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these
prohibitions and these taboos that we have."
Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights
section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of
school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received
three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according
to his official Web site.
While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at
a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general
discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.
"Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot," his Web site says.
From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a
radio station in Fort Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of
temporary jobs, including carnival organist and marketing director for
a peanut brittle.
In 1960, he left with $300 and Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for
Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns &
Carlin. His first break came just months later when the duo appeared on
Jack Paar's "Tonight Show."
Carlin said he hoped to emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the
kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade Carlin grew up
in - the 1950s - with a clever but gentle humour reflective of the
times.
It didn't work for him, and the pair broke up by 1962.
"I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn't really
care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had
been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned
on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the
wrong people," Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th
HBO special, "It's Bad For Ya."
Eventually Carlin ditched the buttoned-up look for his trademark beard, ponytail and all-black attire.
But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his
childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like
episodes of the TV show "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends" and the
spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit "Cars."
Carlin's first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally
Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother
Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.
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