5/12/37 - 6/22/08
Just saw the news this morning that George Carlin died last night of heart failure in Los Angeles. It's a real gutpunch to see someone who shaped your youth and influenced your philosophy so much shuffle off the mortal coil. Carlin and Richard Pryor stand as the two greatest and most impactful figures in American humor in the second half of the twentieth century and it's not that far a stretch to say every comic working today takes some of his massive influence. After all, it was his routine "Seven Words You can Never Say On Television" that resulted in a landmark Supreme Court decision on the government's authority to uphold broadcast indecency standards and the establishment of obscenity-free, family-friendly "prime-time" network broadcasting hours in the evenings. Of course, with the explosion of cable programming over the past two decades, the palate of indecent language has expanded greatly, but when there were only three networks in the game, this was a huge deal.
I can't do justice to Carlin's awesome legacy without posting some of his notable routines, but the IT Nazis at work cut us off from YouTube. I'll post some of my favorites later tonight, but for now, in honor of a comic legend and free speech champion, here are those infamous Seven Words, plus Three auxillary words added to later routines:
Shit
Piss
Fuck
Cunt
Cocksucker
Motherfucker
Tits
*Fart
*Turd
*Twat
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