Hanging Out With Riotously Ribald Carlin

GEORGE CARLIN woulda been one helluava guy to party with, what with the cocaine, booze, jokes and all. You can almost imagine hanging with him and his wife, and letting him just improvise, while you sit back, blow a fattie, and listen. If memory serves, Carlin and his wife, and maybe even his kids, were quite the partiers, which might have been instrumental in his seemingly premature demise. He was not ancient when he died. All of his stand up routines were hilarious, socially relevant commentary, as we all know. The seven deadly words, implicitly exposing the frivolity of such a thing as a taboo vocabulary for the expression of anger and sexual prohibitions, the baseball football comparison, among other, are beyond hilarious. They are off the wall hilarious. And, oh, so true. Carlin never fails to reveal profound truths about the human condition in his comedy, as all great comedians do. My favorite, and that of many others, has to be his routine on religion. Religion would have you believe there is a great big powerful invisible man in the sky, who sees, hears, and knows everything everybody does, who controls everything, and has ten rules, engraved in stone, which we must all follow closely, concerning things one must never, ever do. And if one ever does any of these things, such as steal, or fail to respect one's parents, or have the audacity to have another god in one's repertoire of anthropomorphic human like deities, one might possibly suffer the fate of burning in torment forever, in excruciating agony, until the end of time, in hell. In hell, which presumably is someplace deep within the bowels of the earth, where heat is heat. The deeper down you go, the hotter it gets. Geologically, if in no other way, that does indeed make a certain sense. And yet, this God, this supreme deity of a man-God, the same deity who slaughtered fifty thousand seventy people because someone took a peak into a forbidden box containing the law, the most important document in the world which no one must see,...loves us all unconditionally and infinitely. Oh, how he loves us, so much so that, if we embrace his one true religion (Christianity) en toto, we stand at least an outside chance of living forever in blissful if a bit boring harmony in heaven..with him. At some point in the monologue, Carlin out and says it: "religion is bullshit". If memory serves, he actually says it right at the start of his rib splitting monologue, which is of course where it belongs.