Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits

Yesterday at rehearsal, I was trying to demonstrate to Ken Simon the kind of tune I wanted him to be singing an aimless improvised song to, and what came out of my mouth was a bit from George Carlin, in which he demonstrated how while you weren't allowed to sing at the dinner table, you could stand next to the table and sing yer ass off . . .

I'm STAND-in' at the TA-ble . . .

This got into a brief Carlin discussion, and Ken said that Carlin's 2008 HBO special had been a step up from his previous one. I'm watching (or more precisely, as I have this window open on top of it, listening) to it now, and he celebrated being 70 in style all right.

And now he's gone. I'll miss not having any new Carlin material, but there's plenty of old material still to go over. PLENTY. My mom had Carlin's first seven albums or so in the house while I was growing up ("or so" because she was missing one - luckily it was the subpar Toledo Window Box), and I learned a helluva lot about life and language from them, I can assure you. And I still can't use more than one of the "seven dirty words" in a row without hearing the full list, spoken in Carlin's distinctive cadences.

I was going to embed some video playlists of his first and most recent specials, but the videos, while still up at YouTube, have suddenly become un-embeddable. But you can still link to the playlists.

So HERE is Carlin in 1977 (I dig the introduction from Shana Alexander needed by HBO in those times to "explain" Carlin's vulgar language from a "serious, historical, satirical" perspective, hah!)

And HERE he is in 2008 (I'm going to have to play this for Berit later - it sounds like one of our conversations in funnier monologue form, with all of the same pet peeves, or rather, as Carlin said, "I don't have pet peeves, I have major psychotic hatreds").

The person who posted these specials has posted a LOT of Carlin, which I can't embed, but which can be found HERE, including GC's best albums from the 1970s.

Damn, I'll miss the man.