COMEDY REVIEW : Carlin’s Biting Wit Remains a Finger in the Eye of Hypocrisy

George Carlin has gone through a number of well-documented changes over the years, from comedy sketch artist to Vegas schlockmeister (which led him to a bout of acute self-loathing) to hippie spokesman (he was one of the few comedians to flourish through the self-righteous ‘60s) to the kind of concertizer we saw Friday night at the Wiltern Theatre: A performer whose address is fueled by a passionate skepticism.

On the strength of his survival, and a lifetime of a practicing craftsmanship, Carlin is at a point where he doesn’t owe anything to anyone except his audience (and himself, of course; he’s an indefatigable trouper). What we saw at the Wiltern was a performer who has reached that rare plateau in comedy where one can inform as well as amuse, and move an audience in the name of moral indignation.

Carlin established his authority right away by greeting a section of Wally George-style hooters with “You can stop the squalling. This is not a . . . wrestling match.” Dressed in a robin’s-egg-blue pullover, jeans and running shoes, he spent no time trying to ingratiate himself.

We would not hear him say, he told us, words such as “hopefully, power-lunch, life style, dialogue, scenario, ball-park figure,” or any other of those dreary neologisms that meet at the modern nexus of psychobabble and bureaucratese in the earnest dribble of yuppified self-expression. “We will definitely not interface. . . . I will not share anything with you. . . . If you don’t tell me your significant other is having an identity crisis, I won’t say I’m going through a growth experience.”

Carlin is well-beyond the point where there’s any hesitancy about the form of his wind-up and delivery. Even when a premise is shaky, he knows how to give its conclusion verbal snap. Language is one of his chief sources of amusement and mystification, and its debasement is one of the themes that was to crop up periodically in the course of his act.

In one brilliant section, he illustrated our tendency to euphemize experience through “language that conceals the truth and softens reality.”

For example, in World War I, the nervous or psychological breakdown of the soldier in combat was termed “shell shock.” In World War II, it was called “battle fatigue.” The Korean veteran suffered “operational exhaustion.” The Vietnam veteran must now cope with “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Each succeeding chapter of the euphemism further separates us from the reality of pain, from the identification with someone else’s suffering.

That kind of alienation, or at least the misdirection of reason in public life, is also a theme that came up in the course of the night. “Now they’re gonna ban toy guns and keep the real ones. Am I missing something here?” Carlin wondered aloud.

He views America as “a great country, but a strange culture,” with bulimia as one of its bizarre metaphors. Drought and starvation threaten parts of the Third World while a certain portion among us eat and throw up. He cited the paradox of an administration that wants to “get government off our backs, but they don’t mind getting into a woman’s uterus.”

He noted our propensity for aggression. When we have a social problem, we declare war on it. “We have war on poverty, war on drugs, war on AIDS. Ours is the only national anthem that has war and bombing in it.”

The point is underscored a bit later in his classic rundown on the difference between baseball (“a 19th-Century pastoral game”) and football (“an expression of 20th-Century technology”). In baseball, “you go home, where you’re safe.” In football, you penetrate an end zone. Baseball players wear caps. Football players wear helmets. A baseball game isn’t resolved by time. In football, a tie is broken in sudden death.

Many of Carlin’s political themes have been sounded by other comedians, but he doesn’t give the impression that he’s taken up the correct posture of the entertainment hipster playing to self-anointed insiders. It appears he’s given real thought to some of the disparities in our culture that are both absurdly funny and perilous to the extent that we don’t see them and therefore can be misled.

Some of Carlin’s remarks would sound laced with the snarl of the demagogue if he weren’t so skilled at giving them a comic flair, such is the point blank range of their oversimplifications. And his language is still rough, no matter how native it is to him as an ex-New York street kid.

On the other hand, most of his remarks make sense. If the church wants political influence, he tells us, let it pay taxes. And it can be argued that his language is raw spice for a deconstructed American vernacular. In any case, he cautions us, we should never fear the word. We should instead consider the intent.

Carlin isn’t afraid to wear his prejudices on his sleeve. There are a number of popular liberal issues he views with open artless contempt. But he’s working on a scale that only a few of our comedians attempt in his attacks on American hypocrisy. Where once the use of those seven unmentionable words on the airwaves dogged his career, he has now returned with a thesaurus of at least 700, many of which have a folkloric color. He reads the list triumphantly at the end of his act. It’s a rare thing to get not only the last laugh, but the last word as well.