Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [100]
The Orwellian year 1984 marked a turning point for Carlin. For one thing, his mother died. She had hovered over him his whole life, and her absence brought a kind of relief. “It was truly like a ton of bricks had been lifted off his shoulders,” his daughter, Kelly, once said. Though Mary had been living on the West Coast since the mid-1970s, she hadn’t seen her second son much in recent years. Eighty-nine at the time of her death, she’d lived long enough to see Reagan go from baseball announcer to B-movie actor to California governor to the leader of the free world.
Reagan’s reelection in 1984 confirmed for Carlin that this wasn’t his decade. Though he rarely resorted to political humor—in part because he felt it dated quickly, in part because he was an independent thinker who could mock liberals as deftly as conservatives—Carlin did indulge himself in a few Reagan quickies. “Don’t you think it’s just a little bit strange that Ronald Reagan had an operation on his asshole and George Bush had an operation on his middle finger?” he joked at the beginning of one of the HBO specials. The tone that Reagan set “just fed your dissatisfaction,” he later remembered. And the sense of entitlement adopted by the yuppie generation irked him long after the country had moved on from horn-rimmed glasses and pastel-colored polo shirts with upturned collars.
The period confirmed for Carlin that he was a lifelong outsider, a man who had no interest in being accepted. “Abraham Maslow said the fully realized man does not identify with the local group,” he said.
When I saw that, it rang another bell. I thought: bingo! I do not identify with the local group, I do not feel a part of it. I really have never felt like a participant, I’ve always felt like an observer. Always. I only identified this in retrospect, way after the fact, that I have been on the outside, and I don’t like being on the inside. I don’t like being in their world. I’ve never felt comfortable there; I don’t belong to that. So, when he says the “local group,” I take that as meaning a lot of things: the local social clubs or fraternal orders, or lodges or associations or clubs of any kind, things where you sacrifice your individual identity for the sake of a group, for the sake of the group mind. I’ve always felt different and outside. Now, I also extended that, once again in retrospect, as I examined my feelings.
I don’t really identify with America. I don’t really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don’t really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don’t. All the definitions are there, but I don’t really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.
Like Democritus, the ancient Greek known as the “mocker” and the “laughing philosopher,” Carlin saw humor and laughter as the only logical response to a crazy world. When concerned townspeople asked Hippocrates about the philosopher, who seemed to be going mad, Hippocrates pronounced him “too sane for his own good.” Inside the gatefold of Class Clown, Carlin had featured a parable about a country that produced a harvest said to make those who ate it insane. “We must eat the grain to survive,” said the king, “but there must be those among us who will remember that we are insane.”
In 1983 he had taken his first whack at publishing, writing an oversized, thirty-two-page concert-program-style book called Sometimes a Little Brain Damage Can Help. Heavily illustrated and designed like a scrapbook, the book satisfied his chronic urge to categorize and make lists—full pages crammed