Word: carlin
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When the culture began to change in the late 1960s - when the old one-liner comics on The Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the war in Vietnam - George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it's hard to think of Carlin as one of America's most radical and courageous popular artists...
...Carlin started doing stand-up comedy in the early '60s and had fashioned a successful career by the middle of the decade: a short-haired performer with skinny ties, well known to TV audiences for his sharp parodies of commercials and fast-talking DJs and a "hippy dippy weatherman." But as he watched the protest marches of the late '60s and absorbed the new spirit of the counterculture, Carlin decided that he was talking to the wrong audience, that he needed to change his act and his whole attitude...
...Tank Engine quickly became a children's favorite when he debuted on British television in 1984. A creator of the original program, Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, David Mitton wrote or directed 180 episodes and saw the show expand to the U.S., where Ringo Starr (and later, George Carlin) starred as Mr. Conductor. Mitton also worked on the popular series Thunderbirds and started his own children's-television production company. Ever devoted to his craft, Mitton was developing another project, a kids' series called Adventures on Orsum Island, during his final days...
...jury duty?DC: No, I have not.RR: Are you now looking forward to serving one day?DC: No, I think I would try to get out of it when I’m on the stand.RR: How would you do that?DC: I’d do the George Carlin trick, which is you sit on the stand and you say“Judge, I would make a great juror because I can spot a guilty man [clap] just likethat.” Or you can just act crazy.RR: What is your angriest scene in the play?DC: Well...
...That walkout was the culmination of a decade in which stand-up became the voice of the counterculture generation. Like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and other pioneers of those years, the new stand-up comics were not just anti-Establishment rabble rousers; they were intimate, populist artists who got their power by convincing us that they were ordinary folks, with the same gripes and anxieties as everyone else. They joked about furnishing their tiny apartments and riding the subways and trying to get girls. The strike against the Comedy Store, the leading comedy club in Los Angeles, reinforced their real...