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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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1992-09-10
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REVIEWS, Page 73TELEVISIONStill Testing The Limits
By RICHARD ZOGLIN
SHOW: George Carlin Live at the Paramount
TIME: May 12, 18, HBO
THE BOTTOM LINE: Now in his third incarnation, Carlin
remains the most daring and impassioned comedian around.
Prowling the stage like a feral street preacher, George
Carlin has launched into one of his carefully calculated rants,
poised somewhere between comedy and a call to arms. Bad news,
he insists, is what he most likes to watch on TV; it means the
system is breaking down. "I want to see a paint factory blowing
up.I want to see an oil refinery explode. I want to see a
tornado hit a church on Sunday. I want to know there's some guy
running through the K Mart with an automatic weapon firing at
the clerks. I want to see thousands of people in the street
killing policemen . . . "
Oops. Carlin's new HBO special was taped two weeks ago,
well before the Los Angeles riots, but that won't make his
bitterly ironic tirade any less discomfiting to viewers watching
it now. Carlin himself, in fact, may be the only person it won't
bother. Making people uneasy is his business.
On the increasingly crowded stand-up stage, Carlin remains
in a spotlight by himself. Most current TV comics are
interchangeable: dispensing predictable, painless gags about
'90s values, sexual gamesmanship, TV sitcoms and Dan Quayle.
After three decades in the business, Carlin, who turns 54 this
week, is still testing the limits, challenging his audience,
shouting from the depths of his social-activist soul.
Carlin is unfairly pigeonholed, however, as a leftover
'60s radical. The real targets of his satire are cant and
cliche, phoniness and self-righteousness, wherever he finds
them. At the beginning of a 1990 HBO concert, he rattled off a
list of New Age terms banned from his vocabulary: "I will not
`share' anything with you. I will not `relate' to you, and you
will not `identify' with me. I will give you no `input,' and I
will expect no `feedback.'" Euphemisms that cloud our thinking
are another favorite topic: "Sometime during my life, toilet
paper became bathroom tissue, false teeth became dental
appliances, the dump became the landfill, partly cloudy became
partly sunny."
Carlin can be perversely playful as well as pointedly
satirical. He once suggested new rules for football (sample:
leave the injured on the field), proposed that the Miss America
Pageant "make the losers keep coming back until they win," and
offered a new restaurant idea: all you can eat, to go. These are
absurdist brainstorms that, in a few choice words, conjure up
Marx Brothers movies.
What's remarkable about Carlin is that he has been a
groundbreaker in at least three incarnations. In the mid-'60s
he was a short-haired, fast-talking comedian who influenced a
generation of stand-ups with his deft skewering of pop culture
and the media. Others (like Carlin's mentor, Lenny Bruce) had
poked fun at these subjects, but none with as sharp an eye or
as much performing brio. Carlin's unctuous radio deejays, TV
newscasters and commercial pitchmen were not simple parodies;
he used them to satirize a whole society that had its priorities
out of whack. "The sun did not come up this morning, huge cracks
have appeared in the earth's surface, and big rocks are falling
out of the sky," a Carlin newsman once announced. "Details 25
minutes from now on Action Central News."
In the early '70s, Carlin went through a very public
consciousness raising, growing his hair long and turning to
overtly anti-Establishment themes like drugs and dirty words.
His most famous bit, "Seven Words You Can Never Use on
Television," led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling, which
upheld an fcc ban on "offensive" material during hours when
children are in the audience. In this era he was George Carlin
the hippy-dippy comedian; yet he managed to keep a foot in the
mainstream as well as the counterculture -- he was guest host
of the very first edition of Saturday Night Live but also subbed
frequently for Johnny Carson on the Tonight show.
Carlin has since admitted and repudiated his heavy drug
use during those years, and his career has flourished anew on
the concert stage and in cable specials. His most recent HBO
concert -- his eighth -- may not be his best, but it is almost
certainly his angriest. Carlin's attack on America's war culture
(complete with phallic interpretation of the gulf war) is too
strident; his ridicule of golf ("an arrogant, elitist game that
takes up entirely too much room in this country") too
meanspirited.
But he is, as usual, a whiz on the subject of language,
this time our tendency to add unnecessary words to connote
importance -- "shower activity" or "emergency situation." ("We
know it's a situation. Everything is a situation.") More
riskily, Carlin launches a biting attack on the environmental
movement, charging it with arrogance and self-interest.
"Environmentalists don't give a s - - - about the planet," he
says. "They're interested in a clean place to live." That leads
to a startling riff on AIDS -- a disease, he suggests, that may
be nature's ultimate scheme to rid the planet of its peskiest
species.
It's a daring and appalling conceit, a reminder that
taboos in comedy still exist. And a reminder that we still need
George Carlin.