George Carlin
The angriest guy in the room playing jazz with a thesaurus.
10 specials · 1990–2008
Start with You Are All Diseased, the most honored (1999 · 65 min · HBO)
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He leans forward, drops his voice to a conspiratorial grumble, and rattles off a memorized, rhythmic list of American idioms. The movement on stage is restless pacing, stopping only to hammer a specific syllable. You watch him visibly chew on the sounds of the letters. It is the cadence of a guy at a diner counter who has thought entirely too much about the back of a cereal box.
Specials
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A late-career inventory of everyday irritants and cultural stupidity.
HBO · 56 min
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A two-disc studio recording of essays, observations, and complaints.
HighBridge Audio · Album
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An aggressive hour of complaints about advertising, germs, and religion.
HBO · 65 min · also an album
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Half stand-up performance, half career retrospective hosted by Jon Stewart.
HBO · 50 min
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A 1996 set focused on conservative politics and minor societal complaints.
HBO · 60 min
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Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics
Carlin wages war on euphemisms, censorship, and polite American double-talk.
Atlantic Records · Album · 53 min
On stage
He occupies a strange space where people treat him more like a political prophet than a working comic. Online arguments still end with someone posting a grainy video of him talking about the education system. That reverence sometimes buries the actual mechanics of his sets. Before people started treating him like a philosopher, he was a technician who realized that sounding out ordinary nouns over and over again was fundamentally silly.
The final decade of material gets bleak. The late specials feature an older man actively rooting for an asteroid to hit the planet. He stops moving around as much. He just stands there in a black collared shirt, reading a very dark tally of human behavior.
He started out doing polite bits in suits on variety shows. Then he walked away, grew a beard, put on jeans, and got arrested in Milwaukee for reciting a list of words you cannot say on television. He realized the rigid rules of language were a playground.
Turning points
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Fired From Frontier Hotel for Profanity
Carlin was fired from the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas for saying 'shit' onstage, precipitating his pivot away from mainstream clubs into the burgeoning counterculture.
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Hosted First Saturday Night Live Episode
Carlin served as the host of the premiere episode of NBC's Saturday Night on October 11, 1975.
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Supreme Court Ruling on Dirty Words
Carlin's 'seven dirty words' routine became the center of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, affirming the federal government's authority to regulate indecent broadcast material.
At a glance
Also on screen
- Car Wash
- Outrageous Fortune
- Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
- 1991–1995
- Shining Time Station
- Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
A clip to start with
Dumb Americans | George Carlin | Life Is Worth Losing (2005)