Lou Decruss wrote:

> On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:34:36 -0500, "Gregory Morrow"
> > wrote:
>
> >He started an unfortunate trend towards drug - addled and potty - mouthed
> >"humor"...
> >
> >He was certainly *no* Fred Allen...
>
> I read "when will jesus bring the pork chops" a few months ago. It
> got a little better at the end, but most was not very funny.
>


Carlin's humor is very much "of a time and place". It was groundbreaking
and hilarious in the late 60's when he first started out, he broke many
taboos - of course Lenny Bruce did, too, - but Carlin was "in the right
place at the time", so he got mainstream exposure fairly early on...

[_Laugh - In_ I remember at the time as being shocking and hilarious, but
when I try watching it now it's unbearably dated and lame to me...redolent
of a time and place, it doesn't "translate" well to today.]

Remember, when he was first becoming popular the Hollywood Production Code
had only been shattered in 1966 (_Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf_), so we
were more than ready for his brand of humor...he was one of those of who
broke the dam of the last lingerings of propriety.

The last several decades have seen ordinary news items elevated to the
status of sheer weirdness, we are now accustomed to very goofy and absurd
stuff popping up all the time, the demand for 24/7/365 media titillation is
insatiable...the daily reality is often more hilarious than anything Carlin
could have dreamed up in his heyday.

Maybe the prob is that glaring and obvious irony and the absurdity it
springs from has become such a commonplace in everyday life...post -
modernism and post - irony and ennui and all that jazz.

If I still smoked pot I'd roll a doobie in his memory, using a double -
gated Led Zeppelin or Stones album cover, but I don't smoke pot anymore nor
do I have any LP's...

;-)


--
Best
Greg