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"When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat."

George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937 — June 22, 2008) was an American comedian who made a permanent name for himself in the annals of comedy, mostly for making funny all the things that usually make people go Dude, Not Funny!

After a failed stint in the U.S. Air Force and a brief time in radio and news he mostly became a lifelong comedian, initially partnering up with writer/comedian Jack Burns. After the two split in 1962 ^* their sole album, which was recorded in 1960, didn't see release until 1963, Carlin went solo with mostly family-friendly material to great success, but he eventually became disenchanted with his clean-cut image and entered the 1970s as a new comedian. A DIRTY COMEDIAN. That said, he also played "Mr. Conductor" on Shining Time Station (a children's show), as well as having a stint as the Narrator in the North American version of Thomas & Friends, so he wasn't completely Child Unfriendly. ^note And besides, a stand-up comedian is just a storyteller who makes you laugh. He is also well known for playing Rufus in the Bill & Ted movies and Cardinal Glick in Dogma (which Kevin Smith put him in and which he agreed to appear in mostly so that they could make fun of "the kind of asshole who'd bless his golf clubs for a better game"). Over the course of his life he acted in some fourteen odd films in total, in addition to numerous television appearances spanning everything from The Simpsons to Welcome Back, Kotter and several commercials. He also hosted Saturday Night Live's premiere episode on October 11th, 1975 ^note and came back nine years later in 1984 on November 10th — the inversion of October 11th — to host again.

His comedy was focused on accentuating the negative, and poked much fun at the Logical Fallacies aspects of American culture, especially regarding politics and religion. He also made jokes about subjects usually considered unfunny, such as torture, rape, genocide, etc. This was actually done on purpose, as he later Lampshaded, to prove that we modern humans weren't much different from our supposedly more barbaric progenitors. That is, he wanted to show that if those things were entertaining then, they would be now - and, judging by the audience's laughter, they were.

Despite dropping Cluster F Bombs a lot, he was a very erudite man, who would peruse the media and the Internet for ideas for his comedy, even encouraging people to do the same for their own cultural and educational benefit. Combined with his disgust for the over insulation of our society from the harshness of reality and its own paranoias over its most minor social issues, one could possibly take his Refuge in Audacity/vulgarity laden humor as an attempt to broaden social awareness.

He also changed the FCC's rules on obscenity. After the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" routine, it's amusing to note that the FCC has more or less modified its policies towards the times when obscenity can be put on the airwaves and what is considered child unsafe around the time of this skit. He is also indirectly responsible for Pay-Per-View, which was the logical conclusion on making audiences of obscene content self selective.

In his later years, he became more caustic and crude (partially due to relaxed social standards and partially due to age), and he struggled repeatedly with alcohol and vicodin addictions.

He died of heart failure in 2008, just a month after his 71st birthday. He was given several awards both during his life and posthumously for his contributions to comedy. Shortly after his death, in a poll taken from nearly 5000 of his fellow stand-up comedians, he was voted the second funniest stand-up comedian of all time. The comedian who beat him for the title? Richard Pryor.

A sort-of biography (obviously written before his death) of Carlin, titled Last Words, was released on November 10th, 2009, which Carlin wrote with the assistance of Tony Hendra, one of the original writers of the National Lampoon magazine. After Carlin's death, Hendra approached the late comedian's family with his plans for the book. The audio version was narrated by George's brother Patrick, who is an author himself, and sounds so much like George, it's scary.

As he was well-known for his great writing, expect to find many quotes taken directly from the man himself (and many that weren't).

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Discography

• Burns and Carlin at the Playboy Club Tonight (with Jack Burns) (1963)
• Take-Offs and Put-Ons (1966)
• FM & AM (1972)
• Class Clown (1972)
• Occupation: Foole (1973)
• Toledo Window Box (1974)
• An Evening with Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo (1975)
• On the Road (1977)
• A Place for My Stuff (1981)
• Carlin on Campus (1984)
• Playin' With Your Head (1986)
• What Am I Doing in New Jersey? (1988)
• Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics (1990)
• Jammin' in New York (1992)
• Back in Town (1996)
• You Are All Diseased (1999)
• Complaints and Grievances (2001)
• Life is Worth Losing (2006)
• It's Bad For Ya (2008)
• I Kinda Like it When a Lotta People Die (2016) (posthumous release)

HBO Specials

• On Location: George Carlin at USC (1977)
• George Carlin: Again! (1978)
• Carlin at Carnegie (1982)
• Carlin on Campus (1984)
• Playin' With Your Head (1986)
• What Am I Doing in New Jersey? (1988)
• Doin' it Again (1990)
• Jammin' in New York (1992)
• Back in Town (1996)
• George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy (1997)
• You Are All Diseased (1999)
• Complaints and Grievances (2001)
• Life is Worth Losing (2005)
• It's Bad For Ya (2008)

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"An incomplete list of impolite tropes":

• Abusive Parents: His father. Though his father left before he could lay any abuse on George, his mother and older brother Patrick got the brunt of it.
• Acceptable Targets: invoked Everyone and everything that ever existed in the history of forever (or, at least in his words, anyone who takes themselves a little bit too seriously), with Organized Religion and the American government being his two favorites. In the intro to Brain Droppings, one of his books, he says that he hates every single Group, religion (except for the music) and ideal in the world; the fact that he tends to have more material on one or another is simply a factor of that one group making itself more of a target.

  If you live on this planet, you're guilty, period, fuck you, end of report, next case! ... Your birth certificate is proof of guilt!

• Accomplice by Inaction: Defied when he discussed why he refused to vote during elections.

  I don't vote, because I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. I know some people like to twist that around and say, "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain." But where's the logic in that? Think it through: If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and you screw things up, then you're responsible for what they've done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who, in fact, did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for what these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess you created. Which I had nothing to do with. Why can't people see that?

• Aggressive Categorism: Carlin love to do this in his rants. For comedic effect, of course. He took it so far as to say "Fuck everybody, now that I think of it. Sometimes in comedy, you have to generalize."
• Air Quotes: Revealed as a Pet-Peeve Trope of his during "Free-Floating Hostility":

  Are you tired of these people yet? 'He said he was "sober".' Hey lady, "eat me"!

• Always Someone Better: A bit from When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops has George express the sentiment that Michael Jackson will always be the greatest performer of all time, and that others — namely Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis Jr. — just can't compare.
• An Aesop: Often a basis for his own sketches; he even namechecks the "sour grapes" tale in an audiobook.
• Anti-School Uniforms Plot: In one of his stand-up comedy sketches, he talks about how school uniforms are a bad idea (First you wanted them to think the same, now you want them to look the same!?). He goes on to joke that the idea isn't new. He first saw it in some footage from the 1930s, but he couldn't understand the narration, because it was in German.
• Apocalypse How: Develops from a Class 0 to X-4 in "Coast-to-Coast Emergency", in which Carlin delivers a thought experiment on how he would imagine it taking place.
• The Aristocrats: Told a version of the joke in the movie, going so far as to describe in great detail the fecal matter used in his rendition.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • In a rant about what God has failed to prevent:

    War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades.

  • "Tits" as part of the Seven Dirty Words, at least to him.
  • In one of his books he mentions a news story of two men who were arrested for forcing a little boy to smoke, drink, and perform oral sex on them.

    Can you imagine? Smoking!

• Artistic License – History: During one of his routines on soft language and political correctness, he notes that PTSD was called "shell shock" during World War I before devolving into increasingly softer language over the 20th century. While "shell shock" was a popular term among the common soldiers during the War, higher-ups notoriously avoided and even banned the term in official communications, preferring the kind of "soft language" Carlin was ranting against.
• Artistic License – Statistics:
  • Apparently praying to anyone answered half of his prayers. So it is either this trope, or he spent a lot of time praying for things like 'land on tails'.
  • In one routine, he says something to the order of, "look at how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of them are stupider than that!"
• As the Good Book Says...: Carlin wasn't above citing the Bible to stress his points, as he did in It's Bad For Ya.

  Be happy, don't be proud, there's too much pride as it is. "Pride goeth before the fall" - never forget Proverbs.

• At Least I Admit It:
  • Said in regards to his tendencies to do things For the Evulz.
  • Also his theory about how Bill Clinton got re-elected: Unlike Dole, Clinton told people how full of bullshit he was, and the people voted for him because "at least he's honest about being completely full of shit!"
• Baby Factory: Carlin finds it offensive. He calls it "pumping out a unit".

  I also happen to like it when feminists attack these fatass housewives who think there's nothing more to life that sitting home on the telephone, drinking coffee, watching TV and pumping out a baby every nine months. P-poom, p-poom, p-poom, p-poom, p-poom... will seven be enough, Bob? ... p-poom, p-poom.

• Backup Twin: George's brother Patrick sounds identical to him, so he was used for an audio book Carlin wrote after he died.
• Badass Beard: One of his books also gave tips on how to maintain one too.

  Here's my beard, ain't it weird? Don't be skeered, it's just a beard. People were thrown off by that word, beard. Not American-sounding. Beard. Lenin had a beard. Gabby Hayes had whiskers.

• Bald of Awesome: Developed this towards the end, and used it as a jab at white guys who shaved their heads.

  If you wanna be bald, do what I did: wait a while!

• Banister Slide: One bit during his waxing poetic on teenage sexual discovery gives girls sliding down banisters as one...and ends with a girl introducing the banister to her parents, as though it was her boyfriend.
• Baseball and Football: This is the subject and title of one of his more famous routines.
• Bathos: In "Coast-To-Coast Emergency"

  And now the entire North American continent is on fire, producing a huge thermal updraft and creating an incendiary cyclonic macro system that forms a hemispheric mega storm breaking down the molecular structure of the atmosphere and actually changing the laws of nature. Fire and water combine, burning clouds of flaming rain fall upward, gamma rays and solar winds ignite the ionosphere, creating huge clouds of ionized plasma, bolts of lightning 20 million miles long begin shooting out of the North Pole, and... the sky fills up with green shit.

• Batter Up!:
  • He once implicitly threatened to bash his daughter's abusive boyfriend's head in with a bat.
  • This is how he claims Joe Pesci solved his problem regarding a neighbor's noisy dog, thus doing a better job than God in the problem-solving department.
• Berserk Button: Many things, but chief among them were idiocy and ignorance, which would often lead to seemingly Unstoppable Rage directed towards the world around him. Some of his most enduring material comes from those moments. He also didn't take heckling well.
  • "WELL, I GET PISSED, GOD DAMN IT!!!"
  • One of his routines was devoted entirely to telling a heckler off, in the most jaw-droppingly brutal way possible.
    • "So fuck you and your sister and your wife, if you got a kid, I hope your fucking kid dies in a car fire! How do you like that, you stupid cocksucker?! Shut the fuck up and get the fuck outta here!" Do not fuck with Carlin.
  • When he was fired from Las Vegas after saying "ass" and "shit" in front of a crowd full of golfers, he developed a lifelong hatred for golf. At least three of his albums have included the line "Have you ever watched golf on TV? It's like watching flies fuck." It culminated in the "Golf Courses for the Homeless" routine, wherein he suggests using the land on golf courses for low-cost housing. He also touched on this in his "Shoot" routine from FM & AM.

    I got fired from a show in Las Vegas at the Frontier Hotel for saying 'shit'. In a town where the big game is called Craps. ...Never made sense to me.

  • The self-esteem movement, which he mocked from its beginning until his death.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Treated this idea with disdain.

  I will bet you anything that while you're watching a quiet one, a noisy one will FUCKING KILL YOU! Suppose you're in a bar and one guy's sittin' over on the side, readin' a book, not bothering anybody, another guy's standing up front with a machete, bangin' it on the bar, sayin' 'I'LL KILL THE NEXT MOTHERFUCKER WHO COMES IN HERE!' Who ya gonna watch? You're goddamn right.

• Big "SHUT UP!": In It's Bad For Ya, what Carlin would really like to say to boring people is "BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS! BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS! BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS!" (or "SHUT THE FUCK UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP!", if you got the home release video), but resorts to subtler ways such as body language.
• Black Comedy: A master. Arguably one of the best examples is his material on suicide in Life is Worth Losing, where he monologues as though he were planning to kill himself and discussed when, where and how to do it - and it was hilarious. The suicide note for example:

  Hey guys,

  Guess what? Keep on reading! How are you? I hope you are fine. I... am not fine. As you can no doubt tell from me hanging here from the ceiling fixture. You are the ones who drove me to this. I was doing just fine until you fuckers came along. I hope you're happy now that I'm goddamned dead.

  Signed,
  The Corpse in This Room

  P.S. Fuck you people!

• Black Comedy Rape: He had several hilarious bits related to rape.
  • It becomes a Brick Joke as a Green Aesop:

    Man... men...males have pushed the technology that just about has this planet in a stranglehold. Mother Earth, raped again. Guess who. "Hey, she was asking for it."

  • True to form, he manages to mock both rape apologists and the feminists who tell him rape isn't funny in the same routine .
  • Another bit:

    There's a rape every six minutes in this country. And boy is my dick sore! I'm tellin' ya, every day, house to house. There's no let-up. It's a fuckin' hassle.

• Blah, Blah, Blah: George's shorthand for saying "this person is talking shit".
• Boomerang Bigot: Carlin reserved some searing criticism for white people and men.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • Swearing on a Bible — he questions whether the condition of the Bible might invalidate an oath:

    Suppose the Bible they hand you to swear on is upside-down. Or backward. Or both. And you swear to tell the truth on an upside-down backward Bible. Would that count? Suppose the Bible they hand you is an old Bible and half the pages are missing. Suppose all they have is a Chinese Bible in an American court. Or a Braille Bible and you're not blind. Suppose they hand you an upside-down, backward, Chinese Braille Bible with half the pages missing!

  • Played with in his musing on the illegality of prostitution.

    Selling's legal. Fucking's legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal?!

• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Followed by Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking in "Stuff".

  Now you just bring the things you know you're gonna need: Money, keys, comb, wallet, lighter, hanky, pens, cigarettes, contraceptives, Vaseline, whips, chains, whistles, dildos, and a book!

• Breakup Breakout: While Jack Burns went on to have a prolific and varied career in television, both as an actor and a writer, Carlin became a household name and a legend.
• Brick Joke:
  • An uncommon but funny occurrence. In an early skit, two sisters were to be reunited on a Truth or Consequences-type skit, but "you blew the question so we sent your sister back to Maine!" Then later that sister appeared on a Queen for a Day-like show and referenced the first skit.
  • Demonstrating just how truly awesome the man was, he accomplished this posthumously, with a little help from NPR of all places. One of Carlin's routines was about the appropriate time to remove someone's name from your address book after they've died, with it coming out to six months. Six months after he dies, cue a short NPR story on the routine... and a final farewell.
  • The guy in the Grateful Dead t-shirt and the "Fuck you!" hat, along with how allegedly complicated putting on a seat belt is, from "Airline Announcements."
  • After his "Black Comedy Rape" skit (seen above), he goes into a rant on feminism, though he agrees with feminism on its basic point on how men have systematically abused women and pretty much everything else:

    Mother Earth, raped again. 'Hey, she was askin' for it.'

• Bring My Brown Pants: Discussed when airlines tell you to place the oxygen mask on your face and "breathe normally":

  "Well, I have no problem with that. I always breathe normally when I'm in a six hundred mile-an-hour uncontrolled vertical dive. I also shit normally. Right in my pants!"

• Brooklyn Rage:
  • He grew up in "White Harlem" which was called such because it sounded cooler than Morningside Heights. He also mentioned his "New York credentials" on Complaints and Grievances:

    I was born on this island, Manhattan Island, therefore I was born in New York City, New York county, and New York state. City, county, and state. And on top of that, I was born in New York Hospital...but here's the thing most of you don't know. Know where I was conceived? Rockaway Beach.

  • In "Coast-to-Coast Emergency", the hypothetical catastrophic fire has burnt its way across the continent to New York, and every single New Yorker collectively tells the fire to GO FUCK YOURSELF. To which the fire responds by "consuming all of Long Island and Connecticut, killing all the rich white assholes and burning down all of their evil faggoty golf courses."
• Brutal Honesty: He prefers speaking this way in contrast to Political Correctness Gone Mad:

  I don't like words that hide the truth, I don't like words that conceal reality, I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language, and American English is loaded with euphemisms, because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse.

• Calling Your Bathroom Breaks:
  • He has a bit about how embarrassing it would be to have your fiance do this at a dinner party, and wonders just what drives people to do it.

    There seems to be no really genteel way...of announcing publicly...a dump.

  • On the other hand, he has no problem with putting it on your answering machine message.

    Never mind that stuff, 'I'm away from my desk'; if you had to take a shit, say so. Just say, 'Hi, this is Mary Louise. I had the Mexican jalapeño bean chili dip and I washed it down with a gallon of gin; I'll be in and out all day.'

• Canada Does Not Exist: As he says in "Coast-to-Coast Emergency":

  And while all this is going on, Canada burns to the ground, but nobody notices.

• Captain Ersatz: Carlin from the 90's on became the epitome of the "angry comic". In The Simpsons, when Krusty became one, he adopted the same ponytail and attitude as Carlin.
• Captain Obvious: For his News Headlines skit (though the best part was the delivery).

  A man who was shot in the chest nine times yesterday and refused treatment... Died today.

• Cerebus Syndrome: His act from the 1970s and early 1980s was much Lighter and Softer — less angry, a bit less vulgar, and certainly less political — than his act from about '87 on.
• Chalk Outline: There's one on the cover of his 1977 album On the Road with George standing over it, drawing a smile on the head of the outline.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Though more present in his earlier stand-ups up to the 80's. It gets overshadowed by his increasingly abrasive persona. Though even then he encourages parents allow kids today to be more like this trope by daydreaming instead of giving an abundance of after-school activities.
• Cluster F-Bomb: He would veer between this and Precision F-Strike to excellent effect.
  • The Seven Dirty Words list is a concise summation.

    Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits...to which they later added fart, turd, and twat.

  • His skit on how fuck has changed:

    Fuck you. Fuck you, you Fuck. Fuck you, you Fuck; who the Fuck do you think you're Fucking with? Some kind of Fuckhead? Fuck you. Who the Fuck you think you're Fucking with, me? Don't Fuck with me! I will Fuck you over. You Fuck with me, you will get Fucked, you Fuck! Don't Fuck with me; I'm the Fucker! Don't Fuck with the Fucker!"

  • One of this classic bits was exchanging "kill" with "fuck" in Again!.

    Sheriff, we're gonna fuck ya now! We're gonna fuck ya nice and slow!

  • The "Incomplete List ^note Incomplete because people always come up after the show saying things like "Hey! You forgot Needledick, the Bugfucker!" of Impolite Words", which adds well over a hundred words and counting to the original list.
• Comedic Sociopathy: An undisputed master of the genre.
• Compensating for Something: According to his "We Like War" routine, the whole reason for wars.

  Men are terrified that their pricks are inadequate and so they have to compete with one another to feel better about themselves and since war is the ultimate competition, basically men are killing each other in order to improve their self-esteem. You do not have to be a historian or political scientist to see the "bigger dick foreign policy theory" at work. It sounds like this: What? They have bigger dicks?! BOMB THEM! And off course the bombs and the rockets and the bullets are all shaped like dicks. It is a subconscious need to project the penis into other peoples' affairs. It is called FUCKING WITH PEOPLE!

• Conspicuous Consumption: When breaking down the Ten Commandments, he argues that "do not covet" is an unnecessary one, as trying to one-up your neighbor is what keeps the economy going strong.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Definitely not one of those out-there people, but he had very interesting things to say. At the very least, he believed the imbalance of power in the United States and the world as a whole as something planned, political participation by citizens as simple appeasement, technological innovation as useless and counterproductive, and insinuated that all of that was somehow consciously done by powerful people for nefarious purposes, namely keeping everyone pacified and stupid in order to exploit them, rather than believing it just developed as a result of global capitalism.
• Cool Old Guy: Became one. He was a generally kind and considerate man in his personal life, but anyone who got on his bad side learned to regret it.
• Creator's Favorite: George Carlin has often cited Jammin' In New York as his favorite of all the HBO special he did, mostly because it was where he felt he really got his act right.
• Creepy Monotone: Often part of his punchline delivery, especially in the early years. On one of his albums the audience actually jumps (some of them, anyway) at the way he says the word "beard", and he works it into the routine.

  Lenin had a beard. Gabby Hayes had whiskers.

• Crosses the Line Twice: Invoked and discussed. It was his personal philosophy that it was the duty of the comedian to find out where the line was drawn and cross it deliberately, then bring the audience along and make them happy that he did. ^note That last part is often lost on modern users of this trope.
  • His bit about Black Comedy Rape starts off like this and gleefully plays double-dutch at every preceding opportunity.

    Want to piss off a feminist? Call her a cum-catcher, that'll get her attention!
    * audience groans*
    Oh, don't act disgusted! Don't act disgusted! Half of you are gonna go home and go down on each other tonight, remember? If you're willing to swallow cum, let's not make believe that something I said was disgusting!

  • During his "Capital Punishment" routine:

    Instead of an axe, you do the beheadings with a handsaw! *audience groans* Hey, don't bail out on me now, goddammit! The blood is already on our hands; all we're talking about is a matter of degree!

  • The end of his bit about things that come off our bodies is a rare instance where he bails on bringing the audience along:

    What you really want, what you really must have, what you really need, is a complete whole scab you can put down, study, look at, and make notes on it. Perhaps write a series of penetrating articles for Scab Aficionado magazine. Who knows? You might rise to the top of the scab world in a big hurry; it's a small community, and they need people at the top. *awkward audience laughter* ... I sense I've gone too far... so I'll quit while I'm ahead, and I'll change the subject!

• Cultural Cringe: This American man had no love at all for the worst behaviors of his fellow Americans. He still said he loved America, and didn't want to live in any other place or time than the one he lived in. He just liked his "first-row ticket" to a fairly busy act of the human freak show.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Discussed in Complaints and Grievances, when Carlin mentions parents who carry their babies in slings so their hands can be free to be used otherwise as one of many kinds people whom he think should be killed.

  "I'd just like to take them out deep into the forest and disembowel them with a wooden cooking spoon."

• A Date with Rosie Palms: Carlin stated in It's Bad For Ya that despite autoerotic asphyxia making orgasms 500 times more intense, he's not looking to "double his money" because "it seemed a little risky" to him.

  Naw, I just jerk off, wipe off my chest, and go to work. We're simple folk.

• Deadpan Snarker: Not always Deadpan, but very much a snarker.
• Deep-Fried Whatever: He wasn't a fan. From Life is Worth Losing:

  Americans love to eat. They are fatally attracted to the slow-death of fast food. Hot dogs, corn dogs, triple bacon cheeseburgers, deep-fried butter dipped in pork fat and cheese-whiz, mayonnaise-soaked barbecue, mozzarella patty melts. Americans will eat anything. Anything. ANYTHING. Shit, if you were selling fried raccoons assholes on a stick, Americans would buy them and eat them! Especially if you were to dip them in butter and put a little salsa on them!

• Déjà Vu: He had a bit on what he called "Vuja De," a sensation that what is going on has never happened before. ^note The actual antonym of deja vu is jamais vu, but that doesn't sound quite as funny.
• Despair Event Horizon: What he claimed was the end result of living in a Crapsack World, albeit milked for as much dark humor as possible.
• Dirty Old Fuck: Self-admitted. He admitted, for instance, that he couldn't watch a woman eat a banana and not think about a blowjob.
• Drives Like Crazy: Self-admitted to this in Complaints and Grievances.

  I drive kinda recklessly, I take a lot of chances, I never repair my vehicles, and I don't believe in traffic laws. So, I tend to have quite a high number of traffic accidents.

• Drugs Are Bad: He condemns opiates and cocaine for the damage they did to his health and his wallet. In an interview with Jon Stewart, Carlin admitted he used drugs far less frequently in his old age, because the risk outweighed the benefits.
• Drugs Are Good: On the other hand, in his autobiography he praises cannabis, LSD, and mescaline for their positive effects on his life.
• Dude, Not Funny!: The man made a career of both invoking and subverting this.
  • For example, proving that rape could be funny by introducing us to the mental image of Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd. Either the sheer absurdity of the idea makes you laugh, or your childhood memories will be shattered.
  • In his autobiography he brings up how a routine about abortion received no reaction to a line comparing it to "justifiable homicide", so he re-write the routine before recording it for a special. To avoid this reaction, he also waited until years after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina to unveil his "Coast to Coast Emergency" routine, which was initially called "I Kinda Like It When a Lot of People Die".
• Early Installment Weirdness: Started out as one half of a comedy duo with Jack Burns (though he soon became a solo act). He mostly wore a suit and tie, was clean-shaven, short-haired, well-groomed and a lot less dirty. He did have a few classic routines in the early days such as "Al Sleet, the Hippie-Dippie Weatherman" and "The Indian Staff Sergeant". As The '60s came to a close, he had had it with the clean-cut facade he had to put out and started The '70s with the persona we know today. FM & AM showed that metamorphosis with the "AM" side featuring his old "clean-cut" style and the "FM" style featuring his new "counterculture" style.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: "Coast to Coast Emergency" is nothing but senseless death pure chaos, but it all ends up being TOTALLY worth it for Uncle Dave (everyone's Uncle Dave, to be specific.) Namely, the complete destruction of the laws of nature as we know them results in the creation of trillions of stars with a trillion planets orbiting each one, and on each planet, all the Uncle Daves live lives of peace and prosperity.
• Equal-Opportunity Offender: In his own words, "[F]uck everybody, now that I think of it[...]sometimes in comedy, you have to generalize." Though the general rule was that he went after anybody whom he felt took themselves too seriously. One routine sees him simultaneously mocking both rape apologists and feminists.
• Erotic Eating: Lampshaded and combined with Male Gaze and All Men Are Perverts.

  As long as I'm being a complete pig up here, let me ask you guys a question. Are you ever able to watch a woman eating a banana and NOT think about a blowjob? I can't do it. And I know why: I'm a sick, evil fuck! I know that! I accept that! But I can't do it! Eating a banana, eating a pickle, licking on an ice cream cone. I'm thinking to myself "LOOK AT THE TONGUE ON HER! WOW!" So ladies, be careful when you're standing out in front of that Häagen-Dazs. 'Cause God damn it, we're watching. And God damn it, we're thinking!

• Erudite Stoner: Carlin was very intelligent and said lots of interesting bits of wisdom, but there's no doubt as to what some of his hobbies included. He blatantly exposed this in his ''Last Words' autobiography, where it's pretty much stated that whilst pot potentially helped his career and partially fashioned him into the comic he'd become famous as, there were some terrible downsides. As Carlin once said in an interview with Jon Stewart, drugs were a lot of pleasure and very little pain when he first started taking them. Towards the end of his life, that inverted to a lot of pain and little pleasure.
• Exact Words: A routine of his involving airports and flying used a lot of playing with the phrasing of traditional airline phrases.

  About this time, they're telling me to get on the plane. 'Get on the plane, get on the plane!' I say 'fuck you, I'm getting in the plane! Let Evel Knievel get on the plane! I'll be in here with you folks in uniform. There seems to be less wind in here!'

  Now we're taxiing in, and the stewardess says 'Welcome to O'Hare International Airport.' How can someone who's just arriving herself possibly welcome me to a place she isn't even at yet?! Doesn't this violate some fundamental law of physics? We're only on the ground four seconds, and she's coming on like the fucking mayor's wife!

• Fighting Irish: He was of Irish descent and joked that he was an Irish Catholic until "he reached the age of reason".

  I used to be Irish Catholic, now I'm an American. You know, you grow...

• For the Evulz:
  • When talking about the Catholic doctrine of sins of intention in one of his stand-ups, notably.

    You could wake up one morning and say to yourself, 'I think I'm going to go down to 27th street today and commit myself a mortal sin!' Save the bus-fare, man! You did it!

  • Also:

    Isn't there a part of you that, deep down, just hopes everything gets worse?

• Fridge Logic: invoked Or as he calls it in Carlin On Campus, "These are the kinds of things I think of when I'm home alone and the television is broken."

  In restaurants where they serve frog's legs...what do they do with the rest of the frog? Do they just throw it away? You never see frog torsos on the menu, they throw them away! Could you imagine a barrel full of frog bodies?"

  If you're going to have a rain dance, wouldn't you have to have rain dance practice? And what I'm wondering is, does it rain during practice? Because if it doesn't, how do you know if you have it right? And if it does, why bother with the dance in the first place? Need a little water? Call practice!

  We have flamethrowers, and what this indicates to me is that at some point someone said to himself "Gee, I'd sure like to set those people on fire over there, but I'm way too far away to get the job done. If only I had something to throw flame on them". And it might have ended there but he mentioned it to his friend, his friend who was good with tools, heh, and about a month later he came back, "Hey, quite a concept!" FWOOOSH.

• Fun with Acronyms:
  • Flatulent Airborne Reaction Team - or FART for short.
  • TGI Fridays brand prompts Carlin to rename it as HSIOW (Holy Shit It's Only Wednesday).
• Gallows Humor:
  • The title of his sort-of-biography, Last Words, is half this and half Tearjerker.
  • His discussion of his health problems, comparing them to those of his friend Richard Pryor. This could also qualify as Harsher in Hindsight after Carlin's death.

    An update on the comedian health sweepstakes. I currently lead Richard Pryor in heart attacks 2 to 1. But Richard still leads me 1 to nothing in burning yourself up. See, it happened like this: first Richard had a heart attack, then I had a heart attack. Then Richard burned himself up, and I said, 'Fuck that. I'm having another heart attack!

• Girl-on-Girl Is Hot: From the part about tollbooths in the section "New Jersey and License Plates" in "More Stuff About Cars and Driving" from his 1988 album What Am I Doing In New Jersey?:

  Tell them, 'I don't have any change, I spent all my money on pussy and beer.' That'll wake 'em up. Especially if you're a woman!

• Glurge: invoked Absolutely hated this kind of sentiment and was very pissed in later years when a number of saccharine online essays were being attributed to him, some of which even lamented the decline of prayer in American culture. This makes one wonder if said attributors even knew who Carlin was.
• God Is Evil: A lot of his humor was based around this. After he left the Catholic Church, he began deconstructing a lot of their teachings and the mystique around God in general.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: Inverted in his book Napalm and Silly Putty:

  "The Muslims observe their Sabbath on Friday, the Jews observe on Saturday and the Christians observe on Sunday. By the time Monday rolls around God is completely fuckin' worn out." ^note In a variation of the bit, he says those religions gave him those days, and exclaims, "God has a four day weekend!"

• Going Postal: In one sketch he expects this would be the result of gifting someone with mouthwash.

  Up on the roof with a Magnum- BMMM! Nine dead and they blame Marine training.

• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: He really has a huge bone to pick with anti-choice people and how they expect fetuses to be born but yet don't support social safety nets that help out children and struggling families but then are war-mongering and want soldiers, they kill doctors, and they don't like women as they don't want them to do something other than procreate babies over and over. He even points out that by the logic of the more extreme "pro-lifers" that women are walking serial killers because of their periods (because these are fertilized eggs).

  Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers.

• A Good Name for a Rock Band: In one of his books he provided a whole list of these, among them "Warts, Waffles, and Walter", "The Stillborn", and "This Band Needs Practice".
• Grammar Nazi: Well, really more of an entire language Nazi, really. Carlin was an avid scholar of etymology and crafted a lot of his humor in later routines on the misuse and misunderstanding of common slang terms and phrases being used, and disgust over words being dumbed down and losing their intensity and meaning under jargon. A substantial part of Jammin' in New York was dedicated to dissecting how dumb some common phrases and terminology sounds when you pause and examine it.

  Place the turkey in a pre-heated oven! It's ridiculous! There are only two states an oven can possibly exist in, heated or un-heated!

  Newscasters like to say "police have responded to an emergency situation". No they haven't, they've responded to an emergency. We know it's a situation. Everything is a situation!

  "This program was pre-recorded". Well of course it was pre-recorded, when else are you gonna record it, afterwards? That's the whole purpose of recording: to do it beforehand. Otherwise it doesn't really work, does it? ^note To be fair, you can record something as it happens live.

• Greatest Hits Album: 1978's Indecent Exposure: Some of the Best of George Carlin.
• Groin Attack: He once said that "groin" is the sound people make when they get struck in that area.
• Growing the Beard: invoked
  • Carlin himself considered his two specials, 1990's "Doin' It Again" and 1992's "Jammin' In New York" to be this, as he felt these were the first specials where his material really clicked and he truly connected with the audience. Leading up to this his skits were relying less on character-based comedy and more on jokes about society and the misuse of language. Afterwards his material became much more cynical and dark compared to before.
  • In the album notes for "Back In Town", the follow-up to "Jammin' In New York", Carlin notes that he feels it's his best stuff yet.

    I've finally learned how to do this shit right.

• Hair-Trigger Temper: His last few years, where his stage persona became increasingly bitter and even more hilarious. Surprisingly, he was a calm, patient and almost compassionate fellow in Real Life.
• Happily Married: Twice. His marriage to his first wife Brenda lasted 36 years (until her death from liver cancer). He met his second wife Sally a few months after but was hesitant to act on his feelings so soon after Brenda's death. They eventually married the next year, and the marriage lasted until his death.
• Heaven Above: Carlin has described God as both "the man who lives in the clouds" and "and invisible man, living in the sky" in different routines, mocking Christians under the assumption they believe in a vertically-inclined Physical God.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": He gives an example of this with the word "cock" in his stand-up.

  Remember when we were in the sixth grade and we used to laugh at everything? 'And the cock crowed three times...' 'Hey! It's in the Bible!' Remember the first time you heard of a cockfight? 'No, it's not that, man!'

• Hellhole Prison: A "suggestion" he had for balancing the budget was to take all the violent criminals, sex offenders, drug users (only after 15 strikes), and the criminally insane and throw them in a gigantic prison made up of four states. And all their "vices" would be met in-prison by each other and by supplies air dropped in.
• Heteronormative Crusader: He finds the Catholics and "pro-lifers" to be inconsistent on their anti-abortion philosophy given how they are against Homosexual people and relationships when those relationships are not the cause of abortions.
• Hidden Depths: Despite what people expect of a staunch atheist like Carlin, he knew the Bible backwards and forwards. His final lines in his final show It's Bad For Ya included Proverbs. He also acknowledged there was a chance that people might survive death in a non-corporeal form, but he doubted it.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Invoked. A big part of his material, though not as much in later shows, was to "remind you of things you already know, but forgot to laugh at the first time they happened".

  Remember the first time you heard about a cockfight? WHAT, no!

• Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: Pointing out you could build two Rhode Islands and a Delaware on the land that is being used on golf courses.
• Horny Vikings: Carlin stated the Vikings were real bad news.

  We come from that northern European, basically the northern European genes, the blue eyes. Those blue eyes. Boy, everybody in the world learned real quick, didn't they? When those blue eyes sail out of the north, you better nail everything down. Nail it down, strap it down, or they'll grab it. If they can't take it home, they'll burn it. If they can't burn it, they'll fuck it.

• Hurricane of Aphorisms: The opening routine in Life is Worth Losing ^note which was taken verbatim from his recent book is a Long List of slogans and phrases. It was so long, the audience for the televised performance started to applaud thinking the bit was over and Carlin just kept going on.

  Carlin: I'm a modern man. A man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified, multi-cultural, post-modern deconstructionist. Politically, anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I've been up-linked and downloaded. I've been inputted and outsourced. I know the upside of downsizing. I know the downside of upgrading. I'm a high-tech low life. A cutting edge, state of the art, bi-coastal multi-tasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond. I'm new wave, but I'm old school. And my inner child is outward bound. I'm a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer. Voice-activated and biodegradable. I interface from a database, my database is in cyberspace. So I'm interactive, I'm hyperactive and from time to time, I'm radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, riding the wave, dodging the bullet, pushing the envelope. I'm on point, on task, on message and off drugs. I got no need for coke and speed. I got no urge to binge and purge. I'm in the moment, on the edge, over the top but under the radar. A high concept, low profile, medium range ballistic missionary. A streetwise smart bomb. A top gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties. I tell power lies. I take power naps. I run victory laps. I'm a totally ongoing big foot, slam-dunk rainmaker with a proactive outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial. I got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can't shut me up. You can't dumb me down. Because I'm tireless and I'm wireless. I'm a alpha male on beta blockers. I'm a non-believer and an overachiever. Laid back but fashion forward. Up front, down home, low rent, high maintenance. Super size, long lasting, high definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built to last. I'm a hands-on, footloose, knee jerk head case. Prematurely post-traumatic, and I have a love child who sends me hate mail. But I'm feeling. I'm caring. I'm healing. I'm sharing. A supportive, bonding, nurturing primary caregiver. My output is down, but my income is up. I take a short position on the long bond. And my revenue stream has its own cash flow. I read junk mail. I eat junk food. I buy junk bonds. I watch trash sports. I'm gender specific, capital intensive, user friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the F word in my email. And the software in my hard drive is hardcore, no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini mall. I bought a minivan at a megastore. I eat fast food in the slow lane. I'm toll free, bite size, ready to wear and I come in all sizes. A fully equipped, factory authorized, hospital tested, clinically proven, scientifically formulated medical miracle. I've been prewashed, precooked, preheated, prescreened, preapproved, prepackaged, post-dated, freeze dried, double wrapped, vacuum packed and I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I'm a rude dude, but I'm the real deal. Lean and mean. Cocked, locked and ready to rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow. I go with the flow. I ride with the tide. I got glide in my stride. Driving and moving. Sailing and spinning. Jiving and grooving. Wailing and winning. I don't snooze, so I don't lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty. And lunch time is crunch time. I'm hanging in. There ain't no doubt. And I'm hanging tough. Over and out.

• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Often within the same skit, done deliberately to highlight both sides of an argument.
  • He also said the same about being on Thomas the Tank Engine and Shining Time Station and then saying that most kids are stupid.

    And remember, this is Mr. Conductor talking; I know what I'm talking about!

  • In one of his most famous skits, he decries "The American Dream" as a myth that is fed to middle-class people in order to keep them working toward unattainable goals. You wonder if Carlin remembers that he rose from humble inner city roots to become a multi-millionaire.
• Incoming Ham: "So, lemme ask you something! Lemme ask you something! How's everybody doin' tonight, huh?!" [audience cheers] "Good, well fuck you!!!" [audience laughs] "Just trying to make you feel at home!"
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Sometimes he acts defensive about his own puns, even when they're funny:

  I've got an idea for the perfect name for a gay bar: 'The Mouthful.' Isn't that great? It's a double pun! Well god damn it, YOU didn't think of it! Even if you're not gay, step inside...have a cocktail! Or a high ball!

• Inherently Funny Word: Carlin loved these, like "kumquat" and "dingleberries", the latter of which he claimed sounded "Christmas-y".
• Insane Troll Logic: His "Sports" routine features him going through various established sports and claiming they're not sports, with increasingly ridiculous (and occasionally self-contradicting) reasoning. Naturally, Played for Laughs and Lampshaded, with the frequent refrain of "These are my rules, I make 'em up!"

  Gymnastics - Gymnastics is not a sport because Romanians are good at it. [audience laughter] Took me a long time to come up with that rule, but by God, I thought of one!

• Intimidating Revenue Service: The "Death and Taxes" chapter of Last Words details his years-long battle with the IRS beginning in the mid-late 70s. The stagnation of his career after his four gold albums leading to poor creative decisions, combined with his copious drug use and tumultuous family life which left him in the wrong frame of mind to handle his taxes accordingly, put him in a financial quagmire from which he wouldn't fully emerge until well into the 90s. Furthermore, his wife Brenda opined that the IRS was being particularly aggressive going after him because of what he did and said onstage (similar to Lenny Bruce's constant trouble with the law), and that although the many other stars had big tax problems, they would always eventually settle—but not with George. On the other hand, he does also stress the importance of concert promoter Jerry Hamza coming into his life at that time, giving him much-needed financial and career support through the tax ordeal, which allowed him the breathing room to re-assess his craft and begin his comeback in the early 80s. If not for Jerry, it's likely George's career and life would never have recovered.
• Irish Priest: Included when he's talking about his school days, notably on the album Class Clown. One such priest was Father Byrne, of whom the young Carlin's impression was so accurate that he often wanted to perform confessionals as him, with the penitents none the wiser. Though, as he noted onstage, imitating the priests in the first place was "right on the verge of blasphemy".
• It Came from the Fridge: His "meatcake" routine, which got a lot of play on Dr. Demento.
• It's a Small Net After All: Subverted. Unlike most people of his age, George was a big advocate of computers as a more efficient way of storing information, including composing his own material on them and using the internet for research. His later television specials even name-check popular sites such as YouTube. On the other hand, one of his "short takes" from his book Brain Droppings says that when people ask him if he has an e-mail address, he tells them eatshit@fuckyou.com/upyourass, and this seems never to fail to get the point across to them.
• Jade-Colored Glasses: While he was always crude and had fun poking at cultural taboos for satire, it was fairly light-hearted at first, then his material became much darker as his career continued.
• Kill All Humans: Well, most of them...
• Knuckle Cracking: Demonstrated in "Class Clown"; he mentions that it was a good way to gross out the girls in his class.
• Lampshade Hanging/Medium Awareness: In a bit composed of fart jokes:

  I have no ending for this, so I take a small bow.

• Large Ham: When confronting some of his soapbox issues especially.

  [about traffic accidents]: Well of course they're hurt - LOOK AT ALL THE BLOOD! You just ran over them with a ton and a half of STEEL!!!

  [about why men go to war AKA The Bigger Dick Theory]: What? They have bigger dicks? BOMB THEM!!!

  [about God]: He loves you... he loves you and He NEEDS MONEY!!! He ALWAYS NEEDS MONEY!

  [about life support]: I hate that macho bullshit posturing. 'If I'm like a vegetable, pull the plug on me.' FUCK YOU, LEAVE MY PLUG ALONE!!! You get an extension cord for MY plug! ...Vegetable shit, I don't care if I look like an artichoke! SAAAAAAVE MY ass!

  [about people who won't shut up] You're searching through your mind for something diplomatic and tactful and graceful that you can say to help end the conversation, but all I can ever come up with is BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS! BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS!! BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS!!! BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS... BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS!!!

  [about the stupid bullshit (HBO version)] For a while all this is going on, you're searching through your mind for something graceful and diplomatic you can say to bring the conversation to a close - and all I can ever come with is SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!

• Later Installment Weirdness: Due to his history of drug abuse and heart problems, George aged quite rapidly once he reached his mid-60s, both physically and vocally. Going by his appearance and mannerisms in 2005's Life Is Worth Losing and 2008's It's Bad For Ya, you might've thought he was a different person than the one in 2001's Complaints and Grievances.
• Lighter and Softer:
  • Contrasting two different things, like in his "Baseball vs. Football" sketch, to make one appear more wholesome.

    Football is played in a stadium, often called a colliseum, on a gridiron. Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. Let's all go to the park!

  • There was also his famous role as Rufus in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and the sequel, where he was like this, compared to his other work. He didn't cuss even once.
  • And of course, again, he was Mr. Conductor. Although that was an invocation—he wanted to show everyone something unexpected from him. In his actual life, he seems to have been a kind man, albeit one who didn't much care for bullshit.
  • His material in the 70s compared to his material from the 90s and later was much lighter in tone.
• Listing the Forms of Degenerates: George uses this in groups that gotta go routine.

  Predators, degenerates, crackheads, and fruitcakes; 900 miles of fence separating them.

• Lite Crème: His routine on marketing words has a section devoted to this type of marketing:

  'Lemony taste'. What does that mean? Right. It means no fucking lemons!

• Logical Fallacies: Based a lot of his humour on this, usually using a Precision F-Strike or two (rather than his more common Cluster F Bombs).
  • First, there was this gem.

    Another women's issue I don't get, prostitution, I don't understand why prostitution is illegal. Selling is legal, fucking is legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal? Why is it illegal to sell something that's perfectly legal to give away?

  • And later, there was this.

  Catholics and other Christians are against abortions, and they're against homosexuals. Well, who has less abortions than homosexuals? Leave these fucking people alone, for Christ's sakes! Here is an entire class of people guaranteed never to have an abortion, and the Catholics and Christians are just tossing them aside! You'd think they'd make natural allies...

• Long List:
  • Several of his routines hinged on delivering Long Lists either as fast as possible or using them to build up to a big joke.
  • What Am I Doing In New Jersey opened with him listing people he can do without:

    Guys in their fifties named "Skip." Anyone who pays for vaginal jelly with an Exxon credit card. An airline pilot who has on two different shoes. A proctologist with poor depth perception. A pimp who drives a Toyota Corolla. A gynecologist who wants my wife to have three or four drinks before the examination. Guys with a lot of small pins on their hats. Anyone who mentions Jesus more than three hundred times in a two-minute conversation. A dentist with blood in his hair. Any woman whose hobby is breast-feeding zoo animals. A funeral director who says "Hope to see you folks again real soon!" Girls who get drunk and throw up at breakfast. A man with only one lip. A Boy Scout master who owns a dildo shop. People who actually know the second verse to "The Star-Spangled Banner." Any lawyer who refers to the police as the "Federalies." A cross-eyed nun with a bullwhip and a bottle of gin! A brain surgeon with "Born to Lose" tattooed on his hands. Couples whose children's names all start with the same initials. A man in a hospital gown directing traffic. A waitress with a visible infection on her serving hand. People who have large gums and small teeth. Guys who wear the same underwear until it begins to cut off the circulation to their feet. And any man whose arm hair completely covers his wristwatch. All right, that's enough of that.

• Loophole Abuse: In "Rules, Rules, Rules," regarding "No singing at the table":

  You can stand right next to the table and sing your ass off—just don't sit down! *sings* I'm standin' near the table during dinner and I'm singing and it isn't even covered by your ruuuuuuuule.

• Lopsided Dichotomy: "It's either 6:15 or Mickey has a hard-on!"
• The Magazine Rule: He once said that "any activity engaged in by more than four people in this country has got a fucking magazine devoted to it!" His possible suggestions included skeet shooting, duck hunting, jerking off, playing pool, and shooting someone in the asshole with a dart gun.
• Mathematician's Answer: Related to Lopsided Dichotomy, Carlin suggests that, if someone asks you "Do you have the time?" you answer "Yes!" and walk away.
• Mind Screw: The opening of the appropriately named special Playin' With Your Head. In the opening skit, which is in black and white, Carlin plays Mike Holder, a man with an unspecified job who is delivered lunch by an unfamiliar delivery man. He ends up fleeing when the man turns out to be working with two other men implied to be former partners with Holder and now chasing him to steal an envelope in his possession. Arriving at the theater they try to talk him into handing the envelope over, but Holder declares they wouldn't know what to do with it, and walks through a door onto the stage ignoring their warnings. Suddenly he's in stage attire and it's in color, and Carlin does his stand-up. When he's done he goes back out, his clothing and the color change back, and he tears the envelope up to the sneers of the three men who leave while the stage staff applaud his performance. You guess is as good as ours as to what the hell was going on in the story of the skit, particularly the envelope since they never reveal what's inside. (Carlin wanted to give Rick Ducommun, Anthony James, Vic Tayback, Adam Rich, and Lyle Talbot some work, hence the framing story.)
• Mood Whiplash: Scroll up and read the heckler rant under Berserk Button. He follows it up with:

  See, you gotta use psychology. You gotta be a bit of a psychologist up here and know how to appeal to a person.

• Motor Mouth: Especially in the "Modern Man" routine. Even early in his career, when lampooning his previous career as a Top 40 Radio DJ.
  • A better example would be "You and Me (Things That Come Off of Your Body)" from Complaints and Grievances, especially the cursing that became a running gag.
  • See also the entries under Signature Style.
• Mundane Made Awesome: From his book Napalm and Silly Putty:

  "Do you ever open the dictionary right to the page you want? Doesn't that feel good?"

• N-Word Privileges: Deconstructed.
  • In another routine he says that if he had to pick what term he prefers people to use for whites it would be "blue-eyed devil" because it sounds so romantic and tangy.
  • He used the word in question at least once, albeit sarcastically, during a routine about how the United States was "founded by slave owners who told us all 'men are created equal'... except for Indians and niggers and women!"
  • Discussed in a stand-up routine when mentioning the context in which the "N-word" is used:

  You take the word 'nigger': there is absolutely nothing racist about the word 'nigger' in and of itself. It's the racist asshole who's using it that you ought to be concerned about! We don't care when Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy say it. Why? Because we know they're not racist; they're niggers! Context! Context! We don't mind their context because we know they're black! Hey, I know I'm whitey, the blue-eyed devil, paddy, ofay, gray boy, honky, motherfucker myself!

• Name One: "Name six ways we're better than chickens!" (Beat) "See, nobody can do it!"
• Newhart Phonecall: Used in It's Bad for Ya to demonstrate that a phone call should ideally be "the brief exchange of a few vital pieces of information", as opposed to listening to other people bore you to death with insipid family stories. Vital information such as:

  "Hey Steve, what time's the circlejerk start tonight? ...Ten o'clock? Okay, listen, I'm gonna be a little bit late, you'll have to start without me. ...Oh, don't worry, I'll catch up; I'm eating a whole bunch of oysters and watching a horny movie. ...Uh, it's called, Tarzan Fucks a Zebra. ...Russell Crowe! ...Well, it's kind of a fantasy; right now, Renée Zellweger is blowing a unicorn." That's a phone call! It should not be a two-and-a-half hour harangue of your third cousin describing her mailman's liposuction. God, people are fucking boring!

• Nothing but Skin and Bones: Carlin was extremely thin for most of his life, until he hit his 60s.
• Not In My Back Yard: Once pointed out how those people who say "Build more prisons" always follow it with "But not here," adding "If someone breaks out of prison, what do you think they are going to do, hang around. That's the whole point of breaking out of prison, to get as far away from it as you can." In fact, that entire section is about the concept, that people don't want anything near them except military bases, because that brings jobs to the area and thus is an exercise in self interest.
• Officer O'Hara: Does an imitation of an Irish cop on Occupation: Foole.
• Off with His Head!: One bit in Life Is Worth Losing talked about how he was unconcerned about private military contractors getting beheaded.

  George Carlin: When all those beheadings started in Iraq, it didn't bother me. A lot of people here were horrified, "Whaaaa, beheadings! Beheadings!" What, are you fucking surprised? Just one more form of extreme human behavior. Besides, who cares about some mercenary civilian contractor from Oklahoma who gets his head cut off? Fuck 'em. Hey Jack, you don't want to get your head cut off? Stay the fuck in Oklahoma. They ain't cuttin' off heads in Oklahoma... (Beat) far as I know. But I do know this: you strap on a gun and go struttin' around some other man's country, you'd better be ready for some action, Jack. People are touchy about that sort of thing.

• Once an Episode: Carlin's signature curtsy, which he did after every routine in his show until his balance wasn't good enough anymore to perform it.
• Only Sane Man: He often came across as the only person intelligent enough not just to notice the serious problems with the world, but be able to articulate them in humorous ways.

• Overly Long Gag: "Coast-to-Coast Emergency" from Life is Worth Losing has George go to great lengths to explain the increasingly cartoonish apocalypse he imagines would befall us — how each tiny facet of the emergency would affect every kind of person in every region of America before the laws of physics completely cease to be.
• Oxymoronic Being: Not really, but he popularized a type of humor where two terms are presented as oxymoronic for rhetorical effect (which is not a true oxymoron). Examples he himself used include "military intelligence", "freedom fighters" ^note Carlin: If crime-fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fires, what do freedom fighters fight?, "business ethics". (Carlin didn't actually invent this type of humor - William Frank Buckley, Jr is credited with that - but he likely popularized it).
• Papa Wolf: As he recounted in Last Words, he learned that a boy was abusing his daughter and had gotten her pregnant. George ordered the boy's father to keep the boy away from his daughter. When the boy showed up again anyway, all George had to do was come out wielding a baseball bat before he got the message.
• The Perfectionist: He was known to workshop his routines excessively in-between his famed HBO specials, going on tour to smaller venues to try out new routines (resulting in several fans being disappointed by these sub-par "rough drafts") so that, come the specials, every joke would be fine-tuned into a flawless performance with little in the way of ad-libbing.
• Pet the Dog: A recurring motif in his earlier routines was that he loved dogs, and he often made cracks about how much fun they could be, as well as stories about his own dog, Tippy.
  • He eulogized Tippy in Doin' It Again. At the end of the show, he introduced his new dog: "This is Moe! Moe says 'hello'!"
• Phallic Weapon: In "Rockets and Penises in the Persian Gulf," from 1992's Jammin' in New York, George claims that the bullets, rockets, and bombs used in war are shaped like penises out of a Freudian desire for each side to prove their superior masculinity.
• Planet of Hats: One of Carlin's bits. His desire: making a religion that was hats optional, seeing as the rules on the subject made no sense from religion to religion.
• Political Correctness Gone Mad: In one routine, he really expresses his displeasure with the English language and its bureaucratic overuse of euphemisms:

  I don't like words that hide the truth, I don't like words that conceal reality, I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language, and American English is loaded with euphemisms, because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I'll give you an example of that: There's a condition in combat most people know about; it's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak and maximum, can't take any more input. The nervous system has either snapped or is about to snap. In the first World War, that condition was called "shell shock": simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables: shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves; that was 70 years ago. Then a whole generation went by, and the second World War came along, in which the very same battle condition was called "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; shell shock, battle fatigue. Then we had the war in Korea 1950; Madison Avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called "operational exhaustion". Hey, we're up to 8 syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed out of the phrase, it's totally sterile now. "Operational exhaustion", sounds like something that might happen to your car! Then, of course, came the war in Vietnam, which has only been over for about 16 or 17 years, and thanks to the lies and deceit surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called "post-traumatic stress disorder". Still 8 syllables, but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon: post-traumatic stress disorder. I'll bet you, if we'd have still been calling it shell shock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time! I'll betcha, I'll betcha!

• Pop-Cultured Badass: In a verbal sense. He was VERY in tune with popular culture, and had no problem or fear in calling out all the ills in popular society and the people responsible.
• Precision F-Strike: He had a gift for inserting profanity in some of his skits for maximum impact.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: From his early "Indian Drill Sergeant" bit.

  This is the fourth straight night we've attacked the fort. However, tonight it will not be as easy. Tonight, there Will. Be. Soldiers. In. The fort!

• Raised Catholic: "I used to be Irish Catholic, now I'm American." Most of the jokes in Class Clown are about his time of being one in a Catholic high school.
• Rape, Pillage, and Burn: George claimed the Vikings operated this way: if they couldn't steal something, they'd burn it. If they couldn't burn it, they'd try to fuck it.
• A Rare Sentence: Discussed, and taken to its logical extreme in his "Things You Never Hear" bit from Doin' It Again:

  Carlin: Here's something no one has ever heard, ever! Ever! "As soon as I put this hot poker in my ass, I'm going to chop my dick off!" You know why you never heard that? Right! No one ever said that! Which, to me, is the more amazing thing: no one ever thought to say that before tonight! I'm the first person in the world to put those words in that particular order! [audience cheers]

• Rated M for Manly: Had a low, low opinion of it.
• Reclaimed by Nature: The point of his "The Planet is Fine" bit; humans will eventually cause their own destruction, and the world will "shake us off like a bad case of fleas" and forget we were ever here.

  George Carlin: The planet is fine. The people are fucked.

• Refuge in Audacity: Always.
  • From the "Joggers and Bicyclists" section of "More Stuff About Cars and Driving" from his 1988 album What Am I Doing In New Jersey:

  "These jogger assholes. Killed three of them so far, killed three."

• Retirony: The last chapter of his autobiography indicated that he had enough notes to write a Broadway play or musical based on his life, entitled New York Boy. Unfortunately, his autobiography was released posthumously.
• Running Gag: Well, not so much 'gag' as he tended toward stock phrases for some of his specials to punctuate his jokes.

  "...and that seems to hold 'em for about a half an hour."

  "...I sense I've gone too far."

  "Well, some people need practical advice!"

  "These are the kind of things I think about when I'm sitting home alone and the power goes out."

  "WELL I GET PISSED GODDAMMIT!"

• Russian Reversal: Some of the biggest laughs from his 1970s albums came from simply inverting the words in a phrase.
  • (From Seven Dirty Words, talking about words that are only dirty some of the time) "Prick. It's okay to say if it happens to your finger. Yes, you can prick your finger, but don't finger your prick."
  • "People say they tell time. But you don't tell time, time tells you."
• Sarcasm Mode. Always done expertly.
• Scenery Porn: George had some impressively elaborate stage sets throughout his standup career, though interestingly he never really used prop comedy.
• Schmuck Bait: from Carlin on Campus.

  "Please God, let me do a good show tonight. Don't let me be an asshole. Don't let anyone yell 'too late'." [someone in the audience yells out 'too late'.] "And punish those who do."

  • And right before that:

  "But we do have time for a quick 'Hail Mary.'" [someone yells "Hail Mary!] Not quite that quick, sir.

• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: To paraphrase from It's Bad For Ya: advantages of getting old include being able to chalk up any mental slip to old age, ability to get out of social obligations by claiming to be tired, never having to carry one's bags again.

  You get to fuck with people and you're not responsible for anything!

• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Carlin talks in both tones of voices when doing his iconic routine on baseball (Sensitive Guy voice) vs. football (Manly Man voice).
• Seven Dirty Words: The Trope Namer, which has aged surprisingly well. Still, since he first did the routine, one of the seven words, "piss", has become quite acceptable on broadcast television (though it depends on the context; Carlin even said, "It's acceptable to say 'I'm getting pissed off but not 'I'm getting pissed on"), and others are used rarely.
• Seven Minute Lull: He discussed this in a segment about life's little moments. "Right! I know! I know! Well, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna have my testicles laminated! "
• Signature Style: Like the old adage goes, often imitated but seldom bettered.
  • Many of his most famous bits involve a Long List that slowly gets faster and faster as he says it—see "Seven Dirty Words" "Baseball vs. Football" and the end of his rant on "stuff" for examples.
• Silly Walk: Occasionally to mock the struts of the self-important, but Carlin on Campus had several choice absurdities that stood up all on their own.

  Sometimes, I go like this. (strikes an awkward pose) And then I wonder why.

• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Made cussing on stage popular.
• Smite Me, O Mighty Smiter!: As a part of his routine, he challenged God to strike the audience, then him to death to prove that He exists.
• Society Marches On: Carlin's first two HBO specials had an HBO representative warning viewers that Carlin was going to use naughty language. This, despite HBO being a premium cable service. In 1990's Doin' It Again, George is greeted by dog pound calls, which was popularized by the brief late night show hosted by Arsenio Hall.
• Sophisticated as Hell: He used profanity in his routines, but it was always carefully placed for maximum impact. Overall he was quite eloquent and intelligent, but the juxtaposition of intelligent thought and vulgarity certainly resulted in plenty of this trope.
• The Stoner: The Hippy Dippy Weatherman.
• Stern Nun: Every class clown's nemesis in Carlin on Campus. Especially when she is George Carlin in drag, complete with full beard.
• Subliminal Seduction: Parodied, of course, in the liner notes for his 1990 album Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics:

  "This recording contains no backmasking or subliminal suggestions. All messages from the Devil are recorded clearly and audibly in standard American English."

• Suddenly Shouting: From What Am I Doing in New Jersey?, he tells the audience about ways to keep people on their toes. One such method:

  Or else, just go running into a quiet little store on a Sunday morning, and say, "ARE YOU OPEN ON THURSDAAAAAAAY?!" They'll say "Yes!" Then say, "THANK YOU!" And run! Let them figure it out!

• Terrified of Germs: Carlin deliberately tries to defy this trope, as seen in You Are All Diseased .
• That Came Out Wrong: But he was always witty enough to run with it, improvise a joke out of his mistakes. Quite possibly the best example, from It's Bad For Ya, when talking about the perks of getting old:

  You can even shit your pants! Haven't tried it yet...but I don't rule it out! I'm keeping my options open. Everything is on the table! [Beat] ... Perhaps that's not the figure of speech I wanted...

  • On violent human behavior:

    Jeffrey Dahmer never thought of this shit, did he? Jeffrey Dahmer, eat your heart out! ... which is an interesting thought in and of itself...

  • From Playing with Your Head:

    So I took the earring out and my hole grew over. (Beat) My earring hole. Hey. Hey! My asshole didn't grow over. What are you, crazy? Get out of here! No, your asshole grows over, you may as well check straight into a cemetery. 'Cause you're going to spend a lot of time walking around the beach wondering why you're getting larger all of a sudden.

  • Drop the Cow: In Complaints and Grievances, he decided to change the subject when he sensed one of his routines (the "scab" bit mentioned above) was going south fast. He realised that having many sketches ready to go to avoid corpsing onstage is an important part of being a comedian.

    "I... sense I've gone too far. So I'll quit while I'm ahead, and change the subject!"

• Thou Shalt Not Kill: In Complaints and Grievances, which debuted shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Carlin tries to deconstruct this phrase as part of his overall deconstruction of the Ten Commandments, which he considers unnecessary and should be altered to suit 21st century tastes.
  • In the end, he decrees that one of the now Two Commandments is that "thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless they pray to a different invisible man from the one you pray to."
• Toilet Humor: Not above it. In one show, he said he gave his dog some Cracker Jacks. Later, when he took her outside, "Tippy took a Cracker Jack." (He was anxious to see what the prize was, hoping it wasn't something like a blow whistle.)
• Troll: "Keeping People Alert," from 1988's What Am I Doing in New Jersey?, is a collection of absurd suggestions of ways, to keep people on their toes. "Or just walk up to somebody in the street and say: 'Pardon me, I have nothing to say!'" is just the beginning.

  George Carlin: Go into a gift shop and demand your gift.

• Verbal Tic: He had a tendency to say things twice for emphasis.
• Viewers Are Morons: Most of his comedy was very erudite, but he did like pointing out ignorance, sometimes even within his own audience.
• Vulgar Humor: He once deconstructed the anatomy of his jokes, and said that one or both of these tropes were parts of the necessary exaggeration, that made the jokes funny, rather than just shocking. Knowing just how far to push was his specialty.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: He had lengthy routine about this and the "Self Esteem Movement" in his final comedy special It's Bad For Ya, saying that not allowing a child to fail or be bad at something will ultimately leave them unprepared for adulthood, where they'll still expect to be rewarded simply for showing up.

  "And Bobby's parents can't seem to understand why he can't hold a job. In school, he was always on the honor roll. Of course, they don't realize that, to be on the honor roll, you have to maintain a body temperature somewhere roughly in the nineties."

• War Reenactors: From "Reagan's Gang, Church People and American Values" on his 1988 album What Am I Doing In New Jersey?:

  "The Civil War's been over now for about 120 years or so, but not so you'd really notice it, of course. 'Cause we still have these people called Civil War buffs. People who thought it was a really keen war. And they study the battles to improve the tactics to increase the body count. In case we have to go through it again sometime. Some of them even go out and refight these battles. You know what I say? 'Use live ammunition, assholes! You might increase the IQ level of the American gene pool!'"

• Wham Line: In Doin' It Again, he has a minute and a half rant that demonstrates how "soft" language has gotten, in which he explains a combat condition that was called "Shell Shock", renamed "Battle Fatigue", then "Operational Exhaustion", and finally "Post-traumatic Stress Disorder." An audible murmur ripples through the crowd at that point when they suddenly realize what he's been talking about. When Carlin remarks that the returning Vietnam War veterans might have gotten the attention they needed if they were still calling it "Shell Shock", the audience erupts with applause.
• With This Herring: His compromise when the audience groaned at his suggestion of beheadings by handsaw?

  "You want something a little more delicate, we'll do the beheadings with an olive fork!.

• Women Are Wiser: In You Are All Diseased, Carlin opined that if God existed, He had to be a He since, "No woman could or would ever fuck things up this badly."
• Worthy Opponent: In Last Words, he mentions that his first solo album was nominated for a Grammy, but lost to Bill Cosby, whom he considered a worthy opponent.
• You Bastard!: Was not afraid to slam on various groups and interests he hated, and would actually tell his audience the comedic equivalent to this, if they actually were this. Most of the audience lapped it up, even if THEY were the target.

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Pregnant Asian Comedian All-you-can-eat Horny

Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/GeorgeCarlin

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