Impressions

How does one make a 14-year-old who hates high school excited about language, learning and politics? One way guaranteed to be effective is to make the entire process painfully funny.

At one point I was that kid, awkwardly stumbling through adolescence, bored by conventional classroom tactics, attempting to determine what interested me as a student and what spoke to me as a human being. Somewhere in the midst of that exploration of self-discovery, I was introduced to counter-cultural comedian George Carlin.

With genius and gravitas, he wielded his sharp and meticulous wit on culture and politics with the precision of a surgeon. His unrelenting critique of the status quo — ranging from topics as diverse as the way couples walk to the Iraq war — always depended upon an understanding of the nuances and subtleties of the English language that would make a Harvard- educated lawyer blush. Through it all, he not only made people think, but he kept them gasping for breath between mad howls of laughter.

Carlin said that he wanted to break into people’s comfort zones, and that he did. From the “seven dirty words” to later routines on religion, he made people question the taboos, dogmas and sentimentalities they held most dear. He was a stealth bomber. Many who would normally protest such harsh attacks on social, political and religious convention more readily accepted Carlin’s radical perspective because of his never failing ability to make them laugh.

In November, the stand-up comic was scheduled to receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. It is a shame he will not be able to accept that award, because he, like no other comic, honored the bold and necessary tradition, originally championed by Twain, to bring creativity, humor and masterful rhetoric to bear on an unjust, unfair or just unthinkingly absurd practice in American politics and culture.

Carlin’s comedic analyses, such as “Fear of Germs,” “Golf Courses for the Homeless” and “Free Floating Hostility: Why I Don’t Vote,” provoked audiences to wrestle with uncomfortable truths about human nature and American life that are often ignored in an overly sanitized culture.

One such routine about euthanasia included Carlin giving his anti-Do Not Resuscitate order, “And don’t be pulling any plugs on me either. Here’s another bunch of macho BS floating around this country. People talking about, ‘Aw pull the plug on me — If I’m like a vegetable. Pull the plug on me.’ Leave my plug alone. Get an extension cord for my plug. I want everything you got, tubes, cords, plugs, probes, electrodes, IVs. You got something, stick it in me man.”

He joked that he wanted to “be a burden on people.” Well, the comedic master was a burden to those that would prefer their sacred cows never be tipped. But, to the millions of his fans who found incredible insight and humor in his work, he was never a burden, but a joy — an enlightening, entertaining and challenging joy.