One of My Favorites...Trying to make St Peter Laugh

I can't let the passing of George Carlin on Sunday of an apparent heart attack go unmentioned. In case you haven't noticed, I try to be funny, but people like George made it look so damn easy! I remember sneaking into my sister's album collection in the mid 70's and pulling gems like FM/AM, Class Clown and Occupation: Foole out and listening to all those forbidden words. But he hooked me with all those references to my life; routines about getting a kid to laugh so hard in the lunchroom that he got Jimmy Smith to pass an entire tunafish sandwich through his nose: or the Spanish speaking Father Rivera and the confessional line that you saw moving and the way us 'catlick' boys confessed. Or Wonderful WINO radio and the broken clock or the weather forecast of "Tonight...dark, continued dark through the night, with widely scattered light in the morning". I must confess, I didn't get half the concepts he was talking about in those albums, being just 10 or 12 at the time, but I still laughed my ass off.

Funny thing was that those routines were ingrained in me, and I found them coming out years later, and as long as I would say "As George Carlin said" I could get away with using his stuff to make people laugh. As I got older, I found his brand of observational comedy irresistible. There's nothing funnier that looking at a bizarre or ordinary situation and finding that humorous twist to it; he was the undisputed king of it. He made people like Jerry Seinfeld look like they were observing the weather in comparison.

I just envision him arriving at the pearly gates and trying to talk his way into heaven, with St. Peter pointing out the various digs to organized religion he's done during his carreer. Let him through Pete, we can't let devil get all the laughs. He'll have you in stitches with a half hour on "what's with all the white up here"!

Thanks, George...