Michele just wrote a blog of George Carlin’s life, but I feel that he was such a big part of pop culture for so long (5 decades!), that Families could stand two blogs. George and I had very little in common – he was a hippie type who liked to rag on the government and the president. I am a Republican yuppie who strongly supports most things our government does. However, somewhere in between, we found a common ground and more times than not, George had me laughing so hard, I cried. Like him or not, the world truly lost a comic genius today and I am terribly saddened by his death.
Here are some of the better (and cleaner) George Carlin bits:
Al Sleet, the Hippie Dippie Weatherman: “Tonight’s forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely scattered light towards morning.”
“You have to stay in shape. My mother started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She’s 97 now and we have no idea where she is.”
“I have six locks on my door, all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three of them.”
“Now I’ve mentioned football. Baseball and football are the two most popular spectator sports in this country. And, as such, it seems they ought to be able to tell us something about ourselves and our values. And maybe how those values have changed over the last 150 years. For those reasons I enjoy comparing baseball and football (in part):
Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.
Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park!
Football is played on a GRIDIRON, in a STADIUM, sometimes called SOLDIER FIELD or WAR MEMORIAL STADIUM.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything is dying.
Baseball is concerned with ups. “Who’s up? Are you up? I’m not up! He’s up!”
Football is concerned with downs. “What down is it?
Baseball has the seventh-inning stretch.
Football has the two-minute warning.
Baseball has no time limit: “We don’t know when it’s gonna end!”
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end “even if we have to go to sudden death.
And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different:
In football, the object is for the quarterback, otherwise known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.
In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! “I hope I’ll be safe at home!”
One of the things George was best at was quick, witty one-liners that made you stop and think:
“Why do they put Braille on the drive-through bank machines?”
“What was the best thing before sliced bread?”
“How is it possible to have a civil war?”
“If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do the rest drown too?”
“If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?”
“I’m desperately trying to figure out why Kamikaze pilots wore helmets.”
And my personal favorite –
“Ever notice that anyone going slower than you is an idiot, but anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
RIP George.