Word: carlines
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They say death is a good career move, but for George Carlin it has been more like a career rediscovery...
...encomiums that followed his passing last June, of a heart attack at age 71, what has been conveniently missed is the fact that, for the past few years of his life, the entertainment world didn't pay much attention to George Carlin. Unlike his great contemporary Richard Pryor - whose slow decline from multiple sclerosis prompted years of tributes and early eulogies, before his death in December 2005 - Carlin had the bad form to keep working to the very end, maintaining a nearly full schedule of concert appearances, drawing crowds of devoted (mostly baby-boomer) fans, continuing to come up with...
...surprising, and wonderful, thing happened after Carlin's death. The outpouring of praise from his comedy peers, and a bounty of clips from his nearly 50 years of stand-up, amounted to more than just the obligatory Hollywood sendoff for another departed star. They actually helped make the case for Carlin's immense importance in the world of comedy, a case never made during his lifetime. And so, the ceremony in which Carlin was posthumously awarded the annual Mark Twain Prize in American Humor - taped last November at the Kennedy Center, and airing on PBS on Wednesday...
...Maybe it took the absence of the guest of honor to drain the show of the usual sentiment, Hollywood gush or Friar's Club japery that lards so many of these black-tie events. The comics who trooped on the stage to praise Carlin seemed to work especially hard to explain - to themselves perhaps as much as to the rest of us - just what made him such a crucial role model for a generation of comedians that followed...
...Yeah. You know, the late George Carlin said that satirists - or I think his word was cynics but I think really the word he intended is satirists - are basically disappointed idealists. So you're making people laugh, but you're kind of writing from anger: "It shouldn't be this way! Damn it, why is it like this? Wake up, people!" But as the curdling effect gets more profound, comedy kibitzers kind of do what I would call topical comedy as opposed to satire. And you can see the mechanism of that starting up: the guys are getting their trusty...