On Wednesday morning, NPR’s Morning Edition bowed deeply to the late “hippie dippie” comedian George Carlin. The man who mocked everyone else in an increasingly sour, misanthropic way was revered as a figure of “eternal respect.”
The occasion was Carlin’s voluminously, egotistically organized archives of his career being donated to a new National Comedy Center. NPR reporter Elizabeth Blair never found a note of controversy in his history, just an echo of reverence:
KLIPH NESTEROFF: George Carlin had the eternal respect of every person in stand-up and still does. He's one of the most influential comedians of all time.
ELIZABETH BLAIR: Kliph Nesteroff is the author of the book The Comedians and chief curator at the National Comedy Center. The museum is slated to open next year. Nesteroff says this is its first major donation, and it's significant.
NESTEROFF: George Carlin, more so probably than any other major comedian you could name, was a complete historian of his own career.
BLAIR: Kelly Carlin says she had fantasies of her dad's archives going to the Smithsonian. But then she feared his stuff would end up in a vault somewhere.
CARLIN: I wanted my dad to be a star. My dad liked to be the star. You know, I mean, he was a humble man. But he also knew that he had a place. And I wanted his place in comedy to be really honored that way.
This leaves out the man who was remembered upon his death in 2008 as awfully rough around the edges. In an appreciation for Newsweek titled “The God Who Cussed,” filmmaker Kevin Smith recalled:
"Just do me a favor: Write me my dream role one day." When I inquired what that'd be, he offered, "I wanna play a priest who strangles children." It was a classic Carlin thing to say: a little naughty and a lot honest.
Brent Bozell added to that record at the time:
But it wasn't just religious people that Carlin loathed. Carlin sounded like he hated everyone. One of his last HBO specials was called "Life Is Worth Losing," a sour rebuttal to Bishop Fulton Sheen's old TV show "Life is Worth Living." He "joked" of an "All Suicide Channel" on cable TV, and how you could talk stupid humans to jump into the Grand Canyon during sweeps periods. The original title was slated to be "I Like It When A Lot of People Die." He was talked out of that title once after 9/11, and again after Hurricane Katrina.
But this was nothing compared to several "jokes" he unspooled in 1999. He mocked the response to the massacre at Columbine High School: "The artificial weeping in this country, this nationwide mourning for dead people ... and these ribbons and these teddy bears and these little places where they put notes to dead people and all this s-t [are] embarrassing and unnecessary, and it just shows how ... emotionally immature the American people as a class are."
He even displayed an appetite for terrorism: "The very idea that you can set off a bomb in a marketplace and kill several hundred people is exciting and stimulating, and I see it as a form of entertainment Airport security is a stupid idea, it's a waste of money, and it's only there for one reason: to make white people feel safe."
NPR has a much more reverential way of treating an angry atheist writing books like When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? than they did with Mother Teresa, who the Catholic Church will canonize as a saint in the fall.
