Comedian George Carlin died on June 22 in Santa Monica, Calif., at the age of 71. His work offered valuable social criticism and exposed the many injustices and hypocrisies of life under capitalism.
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Carlin began his comedy career in the mid-1960s, appearing frequently on the “Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show” and enjoying enormous mainstream success. In time, the major social upheavals of the era inspired him to alter his subject matter. Commenting on his mainstream success in the 1960s, Carlin once told an interviewer, “I was a traitor, in so many words. I was living a lie.”
In his first controversial routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” Carlin challenged free speech restrictions. In 1972, he was arrested while performing the piece in Milwaukee. A year later, New York radio station WBAI was cited by the Federal Communications Commission for rebroadcasting the routine. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled that the material was “indecent but not obscene,” restricting hours for the broadcast of such content.
Carlin’s commentary often went right at the heart of class society. In “Our Similarities,” he brilliantly described the ruling class’s divide-and-conquer tactics:
“That’s all the politicians are ever talking about; things that separate us, the things that make us different from one another. That’s the way the ruling class operates in any society. They try to divide the rest of the people. They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich, can run off with all the f–king money.”
He went on to say, “Anything different, that’s what they’re going to talk about; race, religion, ethnic and national backgrounds, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality. Anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other so that they can keep going to the bank.”
In “Colonial Rulers of America,” Carlin derided the “choices” provided by the electoral system: “The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the decisions, forget the politicians. Politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own everything.”
Despite Carlin’s keen grasp of class divisions, his lack of a long-term perspective on the class struggle would at times manifest itself as pessimism and demoralization. Nevertheless, Carlin frequently denounced the domination of U.S. society by the wealthy and powerful. He tackled poverty and homelessness and scathingly railed against racism, sexism and bigotry of all forms.
In routines with titles that said it all, such as “Pro-life is Anti-Woman” and “White People,” Carlin ridiculed the absurdities of the religious right’s pro-life arguments and exposed the injustices of white privilege.
In another act, he lashed out at the racist, genocidal nature of U.S. expansion and imperialism. “This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free…So they killed a lot of white English people, in order to continue owning their Black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the Red Indian people and move West and steal the rest of the land from the Brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the Yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto of this country ought to be? … You give us a color, we’ll wipe it out.”
Since Carlin’s death, the mainstream corporate press has been celebrating him as one of the great U.S. comics; however, they have focused on his non-threatening material, effectively neutralizing the social significance of much of his work. Above all, Carlin should be remembered for his pointed social criticism of injustice, and his exposure of the “soft language” the ruling class uses to mask the hardships of being a worker.
Thanks to such “soft language,” Carlin once remarked, “I’ll never ‘die.'” “I’ll ‘pass away’ … The insurance companies will call it a ‘negative patient care outcome.'”
