So George Carlin, the most erudite, cynical, sharp and twisted American stand-up comic since Lenny Bruce, has left the building.

He had a pretty good innings - 71 years old, 50 years of ranting at the idiots who run this planet and still as funny as he'd ever been. Carlin was one of that rare breed of comic whose performances I'd often keep on my iPod, and I'd walk the streets listening to his routines, laughing to myself like a maniac.

The class clown's body is barely cold, but if he could just look down on his press cuttings today he he'd be rolling on his mortuary slab. Within minutes of the announcement of his death, the mainstream media, which Carlin had spent his entire career lambasting, were already running eulogies to the great man. "Award-winning comedian", "counter-culture hero", "comedy legend", blah blah fucking blah. And who broke the news? None other than E! Online - of all the shallow, insincere, disposable mouthpieces of the corporate media, it had to be E! Entertainment, partner of the Style Network, and owned by that gigantic right-wing media conspiracy, Comcast Corporation. E! Online had the story online within 30 minutes, and without so much as a fuck in the text. Hardly surprising, since they coldn't give a fuck about him while he was alive.

While our fictionally-conscious corpsed Carlin might be spinning on his slab over the smug, manufactured mourning from all corners of the media, there's one angle to all this coverage that would surely leave him with that sense of contentment that had eluded him for so many decades. For 35 years, Carlin was notorious as the man who dared to utter the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. If you've been watching the obits on network TV, the words you missed are shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.

It's true, things have changed today, and one or two of the fabled filthy words have since been heard on the occasional evening chat show. But despite all their public praise, their wailing and gnashing of teeth over the loss of a great American comic, the one thing the mainstream media's mourners have been universally unwilling to do has been to repeat the words that made Carlin a household name. Searching in Google News this evening, I got over 2,300 results for the phrase "'george carlin' died". But "'george carlin' cunt" produced just 15 hits - and most of them were blogs.

Some things never fucking change.

Postscript

Nutty Baptist preacher Fred Phelps is planning to picket Carlin's funeral. In a moving eulogy from the single-issue fag-baiting Westboro Baptist Church, Phelps described Carlin as "the filthy blasphemer, the obscene pottymouth sceptic, agnostic and profane atheist."

As Carlin once said of a heckler, "would somebody just put a dick in that guy's mouth please? Because that's what he wants".

Comments (2)

	1. 04-07-2008 10:50
	Remember kids,    if you don't post any comments, he will never update the front page.    I think he has a magic number of posts which, once exceeded will spur him into writing a new post. Guest Report

henry

	2. 05-07-2008 01:00
	It's all true - if I post a rant and nobody responds, I immediately go into a two-month strop in retaliation. I'm midway through one at the moment. Registered Report

Thing

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