I would bet that Carlin’s last thought before he received his standing-ovation and final laughs and cheers for the night was that each and every audience member out there cheering, at one time during this routine tonight thought to him or herself: “Yeah… the asshole he’s joking about right now is me…”. His disturbing truth is such a blow to anyone-whom-might-be-listening’s ego that the accepted response is a nervous laughter to match that of the crowd. In fact, George Carlin isn’t actually funny. For I realized something very disturbing as this man spoke with contempt. Have you ever wanted something so bad that in your mind you allowed it to be what you expected, even when you knew it was not? This was how my own cognitive dissonance played havoc on my conscious that night. In other words, fake laughing was added to create the typical sitcom fake audience.Īs I listened intently to and watched the live body language of the same old Carlin I was used to up on that stage, it seemed to me that somehow the material had changed… yet inevitably it had stayed exactly the same, with the same timeless delivery. Years of working in Hollywood sound departments helped my ears confirm the false stereo and room placement effect of certain “callers” within the otherwise echo-effected hall – their outbursts were out of place and sometimes non-situational. Laugh tracks were used to either replace or augment the seemingly jovial nature of the large audiences. I realize now as I listen to archives of the HBO and large older productions of Carlin’s televised stand-up routines that the audiences were given a bit of help. No, the problem laid elsewhere… It was the crowd.
George wasn’t the problem, for he was delivering his material just as rehearsed-ly as he always had, mentally re-ciphering eerily associative memory poems with endless lists of material and anecdotal stories with an almost autistic flair. How wondrously excited I was to see up close and personal one of my few Idols in life. This event was George Carlin, live at the Bally’s Casino resort. It was the most harsh and abusive form of truth intervention for the entire human species – and yet it was masked brilliantly as comedy.Īt around age 25, I attended an event in Las Vegas that was the beginning of my own transformation and incremental arrival into the over-exposure of hyper-reality Carlin spewed.
In my first 25 years of life, George Carlin’s material truly made me laugh at what could only be defined as Carlin’s hyper-realistic perspective stand-up routine. He was in effect my only access to what I now know as the Trivium.
You could say I grew up watching George Carlin.
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