Word: carlinized
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...Except for a few intriguing eccentrics, such as Bob Goldthwait and Emo Philips, most of today's comics present themselves as regular folks, directing barbs at familiar subjects, from TV commercials to dating. Their lineage can be traced directly to two influential comics of the 1960s and '70s, George Carlin and Robert Klein. Both rooted their material in the commonplace concerns and shared memories of the baby-boom generation (especially TV) and perfected a lithe, fast-paced style that combined one- liners with a free-flowing melange of characters and scenes...
...Like Carlin and Klein, Leno has a sharp eye for the idiocies of everyday life. In an agitated, high-pitched voice that could pierce the din of the loudest bar, he takes off after everything from convenience stores (where "$20,000 worth of cameras protect $20 worth of Twinkies") to slasher movies ("Woman opens the refrigerator, gets hit in the face with an ax. There's a common household accident, huh?"). Leno's P.G.-rated material is witty, accessible and firmly anchored in bedrock middle America. "I'm hopelessly American," he confesses. "If something doesn't come in a Styrofoam...
...Steven Wright, 31, is one of the few young comics to depart from the Carlin-Klein-Leno style of observational humor. His offbeat, cerebral routines are a string of absurdist one-liners, delivered in a deadpan monotone. Examples: "I was once arrested for walking in someone else's sleep." "When I die, I'm going to leave my body to science fiction." "I was walking through a forest and a tree fell right in front of me, and I didn't hear it." Like many comedians with a shtick, Wright (who grew up near Leno in Massachusetts and also...
...read it, listen to it or buy it. But also, don't bother people whose tastes differ from yours. In a less toxic age, Thomas Jefferson rhetorically asked, "Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?" Today Comic George Carlin puts it this way: "On the radio there are two knobs. One turns it off; the other changes the station. This is called freedom of expression. As Ronald Reagan would say, 'Let the free market handle...
...Reagan has said no such thing. Indeed, he has exerted all his political suasion to put the Humpty-Dumpty of traditional morality back together again. His Administration has aligned itself with Fundamentalist vigilantes, and it created a commission that studied and in 1986 condemned pornography. To hard-core Reaganites, Carlin's freedom of expression must translate as "air pollution." After all, the comedian's monologue about the "seven dirty words" provoked a 1978 Supreme Court case after a child heard those words on the radio 14 years ago. Had that boy earned the freedom to get his ears scorched...