George Carlin, one of the great comedians, has died at the age of 71 of heart failure. One of the things I most appreciated about his humor was his attention to language and the rhythm of his routine. He was very much an artist.
I’m probably going to butcher this anecdote, but a former boss of mine told a story about taking a train ride some time back. One of the passengers in the car got he and the other passengers in the car going around telling jokes. My boss says he held his own pretty well, but the initiating passenger had them all beat. So, after a while, my boss asks, “Excuse me, but aren’t you George Carlin.” The initiating passenger says, “Why would you say a thing like that? I haven’t once mentioned raping the Pope.” It was George Carlin.
Update I was happy there was a lot of Carlin coverage today. I was less happy about all of the “Seven Dirty Words” coverage. That’s an important bit of cultural history, but in my estimation, it’s far from Carlin’s best work. Higher up in my mind(but this is just one that jumps to mind, not necessarily his best work either) was this piece of work (following the outstanding “Advertising Lullaby”) which is representative of Carlin’s work – caustic with careful attention to the rhythm and language of the bit; and biting because he unafraid to gore the sacred cow:
When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!
But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!
George Carlin is the guy who said “There are 2 kinds of drivers: idiots and maniacs. An idiot is anyone who drives slower than you and an maniac is anyone who drives faster.”
I always thought that said a lot about not only driving but human nature in general.
Rest in peace, George.
Yrah and I’ve always loved the park in a driveway-drive in a parkway bit!
My wife still quotes “Seven Words.” It was taught in her journalism classes at IU. And she uses it in her interpersonal communications class at Valpo, when they talk about the section on “taboo” language in cultures.
Great thing about him was that he didn’t need to be “blue” to be funny. Plus he was great in “Bill and Ted.”
Can’t believe he was less than a year older than my dad, though…
Is R.I.P. the correct term for someone that does not think there is a heaven or hell?
Don’t get me wrong, I will miss him and found him very funny. My own thoughts on this.
Ever sleep really well? It’s restful, no? Even kind of peaceful. Other than the part about not ever waking up, I imagine death will be like that.
But, when I sleep, I dream some of the time. There is still something going on in my brain.
If there is nothing after death, then the last electrons firing though my brain would be the onces carrying the pain of my organs failing. Not restful, nor peaceful.
The term “Rest in Peace” usually refers to a soul, not the decaying corpse of a former mammal.
Jason-I agree with you wholeheartedly. Can’t imagine the last moments, days, weeks, months, years of potential suffering ending with “Game Over.”
Didn’t know I was playing a game of “Donkey Kong.”
I always liked his bit about “stuff.”
That was one of the first Carlin bits I heard.
Here it is.
The suffering you describe happens whether there is an afterlife or not. The “pain of organ failure” can happen for weeks, month, or years. Ask a diabetic with peripheral neuropathy causing incessant leg pain, or someone with emphysema fighting for breath for years. Christian or atheist, their suffering is often at its least in the few moments before death, compared with the time leading up to that point.
Rare is the occasion where I’m witness to someone actively painfully fighting death, or exhibiting pain. In many cases, organ failure prior to death seems to have its own narcotic and analgesic effect. Renal failure and respiratory failure blunt awareness. The most common scene I see is the family huddled around a loved one who has been unresponsive for several minutes to hours, taking possibly a last breath, a long pause (sometimes twenty seconds or so), followed by another breath. And then none. And then a peace that is final, and yet not much different from the moment before where there was just unconsciousness, a heartbeat, a rare breath, and an otherwise still body.
If in a particular case, the last moments are painful, anxious, or filled with fear, then the moment that that ends would peaceful. I just can’t honestly recall a hospital or nursing home death that was like that. Trauma cases probably differ, and someone like an ER physician would be witness to that.
I could see someone believing a soul travels out of the body at death, but I have trouble believing that someone “can’t image” it being possible that such a thing isn’t so. I know things that I see. There’s a bit less of a dead dog on the side of the road each day, until eventually there’s nearly nothing there to indicate it was ever there. But we saw it there so we know it was. But what is the evidence for the notion that an invisible life essence of some kind survived the death, left the body, and traveled to parts unknown at the time of death? And how can it be that such a notion is nearly universally accepted (at least in the case of dead people–opinions about dead dogs vary, I imagine), so that it’s “unimaginable” that it isn’t so?
Is the finality of death “unimaginable” because it’s so sad or cruel that it just can’t be allowed to be true? Is it unimaginable because the evidence for an afterlife is just too compelling to ignore? Or is it unimaginable because that’s what we’ve been told down through the ages, and nothing’s more compelling than someone professing to having received the gift of a revelation?
I think the need to imagine a soul comes from the difficulty in perceiving the difference between a live body and a dead body in a way that explains the functioning in the former and the lack of functioning in the latter.
Traditionally, humans have used the supernatural to explain that which they couldn’t understand. Death is/was one of the most important of those things.
Hence, you get the soul. Or maybe, if your an ancient Egyptian, you’d explain it as the ka.
In the modern day, you have Descarte wrestling with a distinction between mind and matter and Leibniz positing a conglomeration of minutely aware monads – the stuff of which matter and mind is made of jointly. There are a pantheon of great minds wrestling with the idea.
As our knowledge of physics, mechanics, electronics, etc. has gotten better; it’s less of a mystery as to how a complex system like the human body can go from functional to non-functional. Still up in the air is how the machine goes from unaware to self-aware.
How do we live our life differently,believing we have a soul or believing or we don’t, or we justdon’t know.And does a ‘soul’have to be a religious reference?
After reading what T. wrote above,and then Doug’s following comments,perhaps we should explore the scientific/medical definition of a soul ( but keeping with science/medecine and the Bible closed).
For me personally the ‘problem’ with religion and belief that is that too freqently personal belief become a tool to control the temporal world of others in the guise of a life that is to come after death. No one should assume that power on that premise.
But 10 years ago I had the experience of one moment being in my kitchen and the next waking up in the ER,with medical personnel looking down at me,and having the feeling I had just come back from somewhere mysterious.There’s just more there than we can reason out.
Didn’t want to ignore this little gem with all the conversation on the other post now.
This is my big beef with many Christians. They treat baptism like its “fire insurance.” Really bapitsm is about taking on Christ/clothing ourselves with Christ. Yes, eternal life is a benefit that is promised; but that should really only be a small part of why a person is baptized. I hope the person plans to live a whole life of faith before they get the chance to “redeem” that reward.
I think back to “Mad Max” who used to scream on the banks of the Jordan River at IU. (I think he thought he was John the Baptist!) Anyway, he’d see a girl walk by with a skirt that was a bit too short-this was the late’80’s after all-and he’d immediately scream out that she was bound to hell because she was a slut. He’d see a guy walk by in a Bud t-shirt and scream that he was bound to hell because he was a drunkard (okay, I’ll give him that one; at least the drunkard part!) If that is all the Christian faith is about, I don’t want a part of it! And if I ever end up doing something like that-I fully expect my bishop to remove me from the roster.
Actually, Max called all the women “sluts” and “fornicators”, because they were getting their educations, living in co-ed dorms, wearing jeans, etc. To him, the men were “masturbators and fornicators”, probably because all those evil women were around.
I once informed him I wasn’t so much a “masturbator AND fornicator” as I was a “masturbator OR fornicator”, because usually the masturbation only really hit a ridiculous level during fornication dryspells. That was often the best approach with that guy–to take whatever he accused you of, own it, and amplify it. If wearing a T-shirt had already bought me a trip to hell, what was the point in holding back the rest of my “evil” behaviors?
A few of my nuttier friends took a cooler and lawn chairs and “tailgated” on that corner for one of his performances. He ended up sitting there and having a reasonable little talk with them. But his sidekick Brother Dan was just totally unreachable as a person. Just a scary dude.
There is a Mad Max/Brother Dan video on google. Classic stuff. The Soviets are going to invade Israel in 1993, and the earth will be defeated by God’s giant cosmic ray gun, manned by space aliens. God told him. Max died a few years back, according to some fans on the net.
I almost forgot Max’s conversion story, as told to me one day by the man himself. He was a professor somewhere, and got fired. Rather than look for a job, he would just lay around reading the bible, which I think was kind of a new thing for him. At some point, his wife asked when he was going to get off his backside and get a job. So he jumped up, beat her over the head with his bible, and told his new job was preaching the word. From that day forward, she bowed to his authority.
It falls a bit short of the conversion on the road to Damascus. But I guess you have to take these things as you get them.
I mostly ignored Max and Brother Dan on my way to and from class. They weren’t my cup of tea and my arguing skills weren’t good then.
I had a friend in sem who told me that his call to ministry happened in K-Mart. Could never quite get the image of “Attention K-Mart shoppers. Attention K-Mart shoppers. We have a blue light special on pastors in the men’s department today” out of my head.
Mine was rather boring. It happened over time through many different sources; both secular and religious. And I can’t say I’ve ever beat my wife over the head with a Bible. Although she fails to follow all that women need to be submissive stuff in Timothy…so maybe it’s time;-)
I thought you guys were talking about Jed Smock. He was just getting started back in the mid-70s when I was an undergraduate.
I think Jed, Max, and Dan were all kind of affiliated somehow. I’ve talked to someone who went to school in Kentucky where Jed would “preach”, and it sounds like Max wasn’t quite in Jed’s league.
Right now Roe Conn is playing the latest post from Fred Phelps re: George Carlin’s funeral. Yes, “He’s in hell…deal with it!” Yes, he/they are going to boycott the funeral. But the best was that he said that his buddies who spoke about his death will soon be joining him in hell. Who were those buddies? Keith Olbermann and that flith-monger… are you ready for this…no not Eddie Murphy….no not Gallagher….no not Carrot Top. Who is it? Jerry Seinfeld! He’s got the biggest potty mouth of all those comics out there!!! Fred, get a grip!
BTW Fred also went on to talk about Carlin’s “Filthy HBO lucre.” Roe had to wait for someone to call in to understand what the word luchre meant.
Had to Google Fred Phelps. He’s the nutjob whose followers protest our soldiers’ funerals.
Sorry…I thought everyone knew who good, old Fred Phelps was.
You can get your chuckles-or prep for an edoscopy by going to his site at http://www.godhatesfags.com.
His “sign movies” are better than some comedy routines I’ve seen.
Here’s the George Carlin “news” piece. It’s right above a “news” piece on Tim Russert in Hell which is right above “Boy Scouts in Hell.”
http://www.signmovies.net/videos/news/2008/20080624georgecarlininhell.html