Seventy-year-old comedian George Carlin has been booked at the Morrison Center on Jan. 18, 2008. Tickets are $42.
Here comes ... controversy.
A snippet of the phone conversation I had with Carlin prior to his last Boise gig in November 2003:
Me: You're known as a very liberal comic. Are you trying to change people's political views when you go out there? Do you have an underlying agenda?
George: No. First of all, I'm not liberal. I'm just about (being) anti-United States. I don't like the way this country operates. I think we've ruined this place. And I think it's largely because of businessmen. And businessmen are not liberals. So if that makes me a liberal, then that's just an association. It's not a choice. ...
I do not care about changing anybody. Nobody. I go out there to show the rest of the Americans how badly they're doing. This country has been, for about 180 years now, badly mishandled. And it's been in the wrong hands. It's been in the hands of the business interests.
And a lot of the beauty of this country has been shattered by them. The physical beauty and the kind of institutional beauty that was originally built into this place - this experiment, this magnificent experiment in democracy is just being shredded to pieces by these right-wing Christians, the Ashcroft branch of Republicanism. (They're) just shredding the rest of the Bill of Rights which hadn't been shredded already. They'd been doing a pretty good job on it up until then, anyway.
Me: Do you feel like this country has progressed any way, shape or form in the past 20 years?
George: Everybody's got more jet skis and Dustbusters now and sneakers with lights in them. They've got more cheese on their thing that they buy. They get double helpings. See, Americans measure all their progress in the wrong way. They measure by quantity and by gizmos and toys. And not by quality and by things that are important.
The most interesting thing to me is that the things that people would seem to have the most right to have - that is to say health, food, shelter and a job - are the things that are last on the list. To me, that is fundamental. Those are the things humans most need to function, and we have placed them at the bottom of the list. So I think that says a lot about national character and priorities.
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Charging 42 bucks a pop for
Charging 42 bucks a pop for someone to hear your grouchy old man rants pretty much makes YOU a business man, Jorge ol' sock. I'll pass...
At least he calls it like it is
or how he sees it anyway. I'd much rather listen to someone who is being honest and thoughtful about the world - whether I agree with 100% of what he says or not - than most of the mindless drivel and propaganda that's on TV and AM radio. On top of that Carlin is pretty entertaining and funny too.
'Entertaining and funny'? Debatable.
I enjoyed my talk with Carlin much more than his actual comedy show. I dug up the review that was published afterward back in 2003 and pasted it below. (I'd link to it instead, but it's not archived online):
Headline: George Carlin: Rude, crude but not always funny
CONCERT REVIEW
George Carlin
Nov. 21, 2003, The Pavilion
By Michael Deeds
Idaho Statesman
George Carlin unleashed a stream of vulgarity last weekend that splashed across the audience like an exploded sewage pipe. And while Carlin didn´t exactly stink, his routine didn´t always smell particularly funny.
Carlin´s propensity for overt vulgarity has not faded with time, but his popularity has. The paid attendance of about 1,250 almost could have fit into The Big Easy.
Carlin, a trim 66-year-old, quickly proved that his mind is as sharp as ever. Reading from a handful of papers (he was learning a new bit for an upcoming HBO special), Carlin tore through a vulpine, rap-like blur of auctioneer-speed comedy about being a "modern man."
It was entertaining. And slick. But Carlin soon moved on to toilet-bowl material that the audience had heard before: Fart joke central.
Even though he´s famous for the "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television," it´s easy to forget how crude Carlin can be -- and sometimes it was just tasteless. His low point was a necrophilous fantasy about saving the sexual parts of dead young women -- so they could be enjoyed by men in an "organ donor" capacity.
From that perspective, age hasn´t served Carlin well. More than once (usually when he addressed female genitalia), he came across as a dirty old man. Other times, he was just a bitter one. Known as a liberal, Carlin made it clear that he doesn´t just loathe conservatives. He loathes all Americans.
Carlin´s mantra: "(Bleep) you!"
He finished the show with another lengthy, script-aided story about how much he enjoys it when people die: Natural disasters, plane crashes -- the bigger, the better.
It was more boring than inventive, derivative of an old, better Carlin rant about executing murderers. Viewers will notice the similarities when he performs the "new" bit on his HBO special in 2005. Not that Carlin hopes we´ll live that long, of course.
Yeah, I guess so...
He's that jack--- uncle your mom avoids because she swears he got her more spankings from your grandpa.
Back to the well, yeah, right that too
2005?