George Carlin

George Carlin is dead.

I suppose some sort of gushing tribute is in order; some homily about how the world's a less funny place now he's gone, how there'll never be another, just like we said about every comedian from Max Miller to Bill Hicks.

Sod that for a game of soldiers! If you think for a moment that I'm going to get all maudlin just because another comic icon's health finally let him down you've got another think coming. At what point did this become a tradition? To spend a few minutes crying into our beer just because some guy we probably never met and may have thought (quite rightly too) that we were a bunch of wankers finally popped his clogs? Nope. Sorry. When it comes to death, you won't get that sort of public wailing out of me any more. I've got better things to do.

There's a very good reason for this, believe it or not. And hopefully I've got some of you upset enough to read on. The reason I'm not going to post my own platitude is that various people in the (ptui!) blogosphere have posted their own tributes to George Carlin. People I know and like, too. Clever people, even. But I've come to think that their motives are dubious. What they say could be applied to any comedian, Hell, you could even say it if Carrot Top and Larry the Cable Guy died (unless they die in some kind of autoerotic asphyxiation experiment gone horribly, horribly right of course). It's sad, he was funny, now he's dead… because what they said was so damn generic, their mourning isn't about the guy who's dead at all. It's about themselves. Oh, look who's dead! Look who I'm mourning! Look how I'm validating my existence today! I'm not immune to this, of course. I've done it myself. I know you meant well, but you got it wrong. Time for us to learn our lesson, boys and girls. Pay attention. There will be a test later.

Let's bring a bit of culture into this rant, by quoting another famous George. Shaw had the best insight into this whole life and death business, bar none. Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

You want to mourn George Carlin? Fine. Do it some other way. Find an ego that needs puncturing. Find something ridiculous, and ridicule the fuck out of it. Find something wrong, and expose it to the harsh light of truth. Carlin, like so many others before him, died leaving a Hell of a lot of work unfinished. If you want, you can stay silent for a minute, but if you want a better way to spend that time, look for ways to carry that work on.

Originally posted to slacknhash.net on June 24th, 2008.