By Beauty Damned

Another Legend Dies

I'll never forget the first time I encountered George Carlin's comedy. I was 9 years old. My brother was 11. Somehow Joshua had gotten his hands on a video tape which contained on it two things: Eddie Murphy's Delirious and George Carlin's HBO special, the one where he wears the green turtleneck and the burgundy pants (or is it the other way around?) and reads a practically endless list of dirty words and phrases from a long scroll. I knew some of them already, but he taught me a lot of new ones. We watched both of the videos repeatedly, I guess when our parents weren't home. I don't know how we got away with it. Or maybe they knew, I can't remember them raising a single objection the way they did when it came to movies or television shows that contained sex or violence. They didn't ever seem disturbed that Josh and I had learned a plethora of new jokes that contained nearly every "offensive" word and concept in the English language and that we repeated these things to each other with extreme glee.

We memorized and recited every line in Delirious. Eddie Murphy's storytelling was brilliant and the images of family events and sexual encounters that he drew with voices and characters had us holding our stomachs and laughing until it hurt. But George Carlin had something incredibly unique as well, something that I have idolized my whole life since. He was grouchy. Curmudgeonly, even. He grouched and grouched about things in a way that was so charming, so unbelievably easy to identify with, it felt like he was speaking the thoughts that were already in your head but you never could have found a way to articulate with the concise accuracy that he was able to convey in the expression of any idea. He said things better than other people said them, in a way that seemed there could be no way to argue with him. I imagined him in a debate with one who might disagree with him about his ideas about the world and I always imagined him winning immediately. First round knockout. Seemed like everything he ever said was so honest and for that reason irrefutably true.

I never grew out of George Carlin. He has continued to be a person whose thoughts and ideas and ways of expressing them has captivated and entertained me. Those parts of him will live on forever and ever in this world, long after we are all gone. It was quite a mark he left. Quite a mark.