George Carlin – Memphis Flyer

In the second episode of HBO’s epic, four-hour documentary George Carlin’s American Dream, Chris Rock recalls the comedy legend telling him, “I’m not an entertainer, I’m a comedian.”

Rock says the offhand comment stuck with him, and he realized that comedians inhabited the same cultural niches that used to be reserved for philosophers. In the very next clip, Jerry Seinfeld disagrees, saying, “I’ve never changed my opinion on anything because of a bit.”

That two of the most popular comedians of the last 50 years, both of whom were heavily influenced by George Carlin, could disagree so profoundly about their role in the world speaks to the breadth and depth of the comedian’s work. During his four decades in the comedy spotlight, Carlin mastered both the observational comedy of the everyday, which propelled Seinfeld to becoming the biggest TV comedy of the 1990s, and the insightful social commentary, which keeps his words alive in today’s online political discourse. The new documentary, by directors Judd Apatow (something of a comedy legend himself) and Michael Bonfiglio, aims to detail the full scope of the man who reinvented comedy many times over.

Made with the help of his daughter Kelly Carlin and second wife Sally Wade, American Dream boasts a wealth of both Carlin’s home movies and his TV appearances, of which there were literally thousands. In his early days, he idolized Danny Kaye, and every step of his journey from radio DJ to goofy variety show guest was calculated as a way to break into the movies. But the rebellious streak that got him kicked out of the Air Force made him too dangerous for the mainstream. And besides, as he would later admit when his post-Seinfeld TV comedy was canceled after one season, “I’m not much of an actor.” Kelly Carlin describes her father as “a road comic until the day he died,” and the interaction with the crowd was always at the heart of Carlin’s art.

Carlin’s real skill was his penetrating insight and brutal honesty. His final reinvention, which coincided with his development of the HBO comedy special, would prove to be the most profound. “The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy!” he declared in his now-classic 1992 show Jammin’ in New York. The documentary’s powerful climax comes in an extended montage of events that have happened since Carlin’s 2008 death juxtaposed with clips from his comedy routines that concisely predicted and explained it all.

Around the time Carlin was reinventing himself as a philosopher, a group of Canadian 20-somethings were reinventing sketch comedy. The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks reveals that the group got their name from the would-be comedy writers who lingered outside Jack Benny’s office trying to sell him jokes — and Mark McKinney is still bitter that they didn’t use the name he suggested, The Audience.

But the name fit McKinney, Bruce McCulloch, Scott Thompson, Kevin McDonald, and Dave Foley. They were outsiders in the suburban Canada where they grew up, which bred an anarchic attitude in their comedy writing. The five friends spent much of the ’80s playing to tiny audiences of goth weirdos at the Rivoli, a punk rock club in Toronto, Canada, and the documentary features lots of priceless footage of the Kids both killing and dying on stage as they developed their act. By the time the talent scouts from Saturday Night Live arrived in 1986, they couldn’t get tickets to the sold-out shows. After hiring Foley and McKinney for a brief stint as SNL writers, Lorne Michaels brought the whole crew to New York, where they proceeded to spend his development money on ecstasy-fueled nights on the town while creating the defining comedy aesthetic of Generation X. After a bad, mid-’90s breakup brought on by inflated egos, Foley’s gig on NewsRadio, and the cursed production of their only feature film, Brain Candy, the Kids’ cult continued to grow, thanks to endless reruns on Comedy Central.

Where American Dream is a deep dive into the legacy of a timeless artist, Comedy Punks is more of a conventional celebratory documentary. It makes the case that the Kids’ stable of gender-fluid (nobody did drag comedy better than them) and gay-positive characters changed the comedy boys’ club for the better. Certainly, their Dadaist streak left a huge mark on contemporary comedy. Since the documentary’s release coincides with a new season of their seminal show on Amazon Prime Video, it seems the Kids themselves will get the last word.

George Carlin’s American Dream is streaming on HBO Max.
The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks is streaming on Amazon Prime.

There’s been much discussion over the past few days about “banned words” in the wake of reports by the Washington Post and other media outlets that multiple agencies in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), have been told by Trump administration officials that they cannot use certain words and phrases in agency documents.

The words purportedly banned for used in official agency reports being prepared for the 2019 budget were: entitlement, diversity, vulnerable, transgender, fetus, evidence-based, and science-based. Several sources at HHS also told the Post that they’d been told to use “ObamaCare” as opposed to the “Affordable Care Act” and to refer to “marketplaces” where people purchase health insurance as “exchanges.”

“The assertion that HHS has ‘banned words’ is a complete mischaracterization of discussions regarding the budget formulation process,” said HHS spokesman Matt Lloyd to The Hill.

So, in conclusion, we have reports arising from multiple sources in several federal agencies to multiple media outlets saying they’d been given instruction as to what words they could and couldn’t use in government documents, followed by a denial from an official spokesperson that any of it ever happened.

Your call.

This semantic kerfluffle should serve to remind us that whoever controls language controls the message. George Orwell famously illustrated this in his novel 1984, set in a dystopian then-future world, wherein citizens of Oceania were constantly exposed by their government to such slogans as “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” Thirty-three years after Orwell’s future tome, there is little doubt that a battle is raging in this country to control the message.

It seems quaint to think that until as recently as 1987, licensed broadcasters in the U.S. were required to observe something called the Fairness Doctrine, a policy of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that required broadcast license holders to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was — in the FCC’s view — honest and equitable. It was imperfect in its execution, but its intention was to guarantee that U.S. citizens would be able to rely on their broadcast media to present a fair and balanced picture of the news of the day. (“Fair and balanced”? I’ve heard that somewhere.)

National news networks, and even local news and affairs programs, were constrained from the kind of partisan cheerleading that passes for news and analysis these days. Broadcasters were required by law to grant equal time to opposing views. Crazy, right?

Nowadays, if you want both sides of an issue, you have to watch and listen to several news outlets. MSNBC is reliably left of center; CNN is slightly left, but usually makes an attempt to present both sides; Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has basically disintegrated into state media, wholly in service to the Trump/GOP agenda — even going so far as to suggest this week that the FBI was staging a “coup” by pursuing its investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible Russian connections.

What’s next? Alex Jones as Sean Hannity’s new sidekick? I’m still trying to figure out how being “conservative” has come to mean siding with our arch-enemy, Russia, against our own U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This is weird and dangerous turf.

The late, great comedian George Carlin had a blistering routine about the “seven words you can’t say on television.” I urge you to dial it up on your local YouTube and watch it. It’s hilarious and scary good. But again, “forbidden words.” How quaint. One night’s channel surfing will make it clear that there are no words that can’t be spoken on your television.

Oh, sure, Wolf Blitzer still can’t just pop off and rhetorically ask, “How the f**k can Kellyanne Conway say that with a straight face?” (Though that would be refreshing.) According to the FCC, there are still “forbidden words” for licensed broadcasters. But there are no forbidden ideas; no forbidden lies; no FCC policy to monitor fairness or equity or balance. It’s the wild west; every viewer for themselves.

Choose what’s fake. Choose what’s real. Choose your truth. Ignorance is not strength.