(Sent back in time from my future-self in 2023, cuz I was oblivious until I looked it up a couple days ago)
George Carlin's conscience.
IMHO.
So, I got to thinking about how 70% of the 80's/90's edge-lord standups, and 99% of the shock-jocks have edged themselves up to fucking Nazi, and how George Carlin avoided making that turn.
During the height of Andrew Dice Clay, when his pay-per-views were flat out Klan rallies, George even said in a Larry King interview, "I think he has the freedom to say whatever he wishes, but he also needs to remember that his type of punching-down comedy appeals to a certain audience, and that audience has a list of people they don't like, and as a Jew, he's on that list".
Carlin also considered himself a "free speech absolutist" but all the other people who stick that label on their chest never would make that "punching down" "punching up" distinction.
They even think punching down is punching up, because something, something, protected class, something, something.
Bullshit. That's just the "we're the minorities!" speech from the Dennis Hopper neo-Nazi episode of Twilight Zone.
Why didn't Carlin fall into that trap of becoming a CHUD-y fucking bigot?
Jack Burns.
When George started out, they were a comic duo called Burns & Carlin.
Jack Burns was a full-on secret commie, and got ahold of George at the right time in his life, and explained to him how "conservatives care about things more than people" and gave him some commie literature.
Read about it right from the horse's mouth in Carlin's "Last Words".
I've got a weirdly long memory for this shit.
I think that planted the right seeds to keep the fascism at bay in Carlin's soul.
The pot helped, the LSD helped, but Burns's influence is not to be underestimated.
The picture becomes more clear to me the more and more "edgy rebels" from my youth turn fucking Trump-sucker and/or swastika kisser.
No man is an island, not even Carlin (in spite of his stage persona), and you need that Jiminy Cricket in your life to keep you on the right path.
Jack Burns was Carlin's; Margaret was mine.
Anyway, thinking of all of that made me curious about whether Jack was still around, and what he got up to after Burns & Carlin.
As to the latter, he wrote for "The Muppet Show" and co-wrote "The Muppet Movie".
And remember Vince and Larry the talking crash test dummies from the 80's-90's?
Jack was the one that wasn't Lorenzo Music.
As to the former, he passed of "respiratory failure" in 2020.
In 2020?
Come on, it was probably covid.
So, yeah, Jack Burns.
The unsung hero you probably just now heard about.
3 comments:
When I was a kid I excitedly bought a couple of Sam Kinison stand-up comedy DVDs that were miserably overpriced and I gave them to my brother and haven't watched them since, but I can remember clear as day that part of Sam's act in one of them (it had to have been within a year or two before he died) was him talking about how he was a good old classic hard rock & roll kinda guy (he had Randy Hansen the guitarist and Hendrix impersonator playing generic hard rock songs on stage with him) and how he was "MC Hammered out, man" and then he started urging the audience to "...get really angry...and KILL RAPPERS!!!!!!" It was a gag of course (I think Ice T, himself very controversial at the time--ironically, for a heavy metal song that people don't remember the melody to, just the controversy--was sitting in the audience, and the camera cut to him laughing to show it was just a gag) but I thought of the racial divide there when I read Carlin's comments about Andrew Dice Clay.
It's gotta be really easily forgotten that Andrew Dice Clay was Jewish, too...most people probably think he's Italian.
Why didn't Carlin go CHUD...I dunno. A lot of his audience was collegiate, no? "Carlin On Campus" and all that?
Even Kinison hated Dice.
All the standups knew the Diceman thing was a deep put-on.
Although, he kinda morphed into that character.
He's a walking Twilight Zone.
The one where the people morph into the ugly masks they're wearing.
Carlin took to the coffee house and campus crowd....after being commie-fied by Burns!
Even his famous arrest at the Lenny Bruce concert was after Burns.
I can't prove perfect causation in a courtroom setting, but the timelines line up.
I did remember Kinison trashing Dice's dirty nursery rhymes in an interview.
I've read a number of defenses of Diceman and a lot of Hunter S. Thompson type arguments that he was really misunderstood by squares and whiners but it all goes back to me listening to "The Day The Laughter Died" and realizing that I not only didn't like it but could barely see how anybody could get into it, as I found it (this isn't how things are supposed to be) BORING.
It's difficult to guess what the Dice controversy would mean to people who didn't live through it, or if any young people today are even looking that up (remember, I live in the Midwest, and have talked to younger generations who have no idea what the Oklahoma City Bombing was!) I do see that Dice is still around though I'm not sure what he's really up to. How would the Dice controversy play today?...well, right-wingers are trying to claim "freethinking" for themselves, so Carlin would be proven right, they'd love him if he were new. Of course Carlin would be banned from campuses today too, so.
Have you seen the Dustin Hoffman movie where he played Lenny Bruce? Was it good?
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