The comedian liked to cause a fuss with his observations -- and we liked him for it.
It was always comforting to know that George Carlin was out there making trouble. Like Richard Pryor, he straddled the great cultural divide that was the 1960s, coming in as a lamb and going out as a lion.
I remember him first as another of that age's suit-and-tie comics, putting on funny characters: the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman ("Tonight's forecast: Dark") or an Indian drill sergeant ("knock off the horseplay -- you guys over there playing with the horse, will ya knock it off?"), a part he played wearing a headband and a feather. He eventually went native himself, growing his hair long and taking up themes inherited from Lenny Bruce: American fear, the hypocrisy of religion, the subtle traps and distorting power of language, and especially the way that people hide behind words in order not to not face facts -- in the way, for instance, that the straightforward term “shell shock" became “battle fatigue" ("Four syllables now, takes a little longer to say, doesn't seem to hurt as much -- 'fatigue' is a nicer word than 'shock' “) and then “post-traumatic stress disorder" ("We've added a hyphen, and the pain is completely buried under jargon").
But the time was ripe for Carlin in a way it never was for Bruce -- success on the college circuit kept his audience young and allowed his comedy to be as profane as he needed it to be.
