A lot of people responded to George Carlin’s passing by posting a string of obscenities, a reference to his famous “seven words” bit.  I’d like to tell a story from my childhood.

I was thirteen when Parental Guidance: Explicit Lyrics came out, and I picked up a copy.  I had it on when my mom came into the room, and I surreptitiously turned it down.  She smiled and asked, “is that George Carlin?  He’s still putting out records?”

See, one of the difficult parts about being the youngest child is that your older siblings have already shocked your parents in every conceivable way.  My brother was bringing home Carlin records back in the 70s, so they were nothing new in 1990.  My mom even admitted to kind of liking some of his humor.

I think Carlin’s voice, and the exaggerated inflections he used, pushed his jokes over the line between “funny” and “hilarious”.  He came off as someone frustrated with having to explain the obvious.

Men are basically insecure about the size of their dicks and so they go to war over it. You don’t have to be a political scientist or a history major to see the bigger dick foreign policy theory at work. It goes something like this…”what they have bigger dicks? Bomb them!!!” And of course the bombs and the bullets and the rockets are all shaped like dicks. I don’t understand that part of it, but it is part of the equation.

This might also explain why I like Louis Black so much. It’s not so much the jokes themselves, but how they’re presented.

Jerry Seinfeld has a touching eulogy for George Carlin in today’s New York Times.