5 Social Issues George Carlin Made Relevant

“In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem.”

George Carlin was ahead of his time. Being woke, leading the charge in cancel culture, fighting censorship, and supporting those who are vulnerable and don’t have a voice. Going after racists, sexists, fascists, and aiming to bring those who try to restrict freedom to justice. These current events and social issues that are relevant today were being fought before people like Greta Thunberg, Malala, David Hogg, and AOC were even born.

Using comedy, George Denis Patrick Carlin brought important and critical issues of injustice into the living rooms of everyday people. Unlike politicians, protesters, or activists who are sometimes overwhelming and too in your face for the average Joe, Carlin was able to use stand-up comedy to make people laugh while they realized how cruel and unfair society was.

Who Was George Carlin

Born in New York in 1937, he was a child of separated parents and lived with his mother. His father was an Irish immigrant and alcoholic, while his mother was a secretary who raised Carlin and his brother on her own.

Before comedy, he was in the Air Force where he was court-martialed three times. He was also a radio DJ before being fired and entering comedy. His life was riddled with addictions to alcohol, marijuana, LSD, cocaine, and other drugs. He was born into a Catholic home but rejected religion and was weary of members and leaders of the faith.

He also had a long history of heart problems and suffered three heart attacks and heart failure. He died in 2008 of heart failure at age 71. Here are just five social issues that Carlin tackled in his comedy and brought to light.

Abortion

Why, why, why, why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place, huh?

A hot-button topic that continues to this day, abortion and women’s right to choose has been an issue both in the US and around the world. Protests, the closing of abortion clinics, violence, the murder of doctors, and attempts to make abortion illegal has been an ongoing battle that most likely will continue without end. Here is what Carlin said about conservatives and people who consider themselves pro-life.

From his comedy album A place for my stuff in 1981:

They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re preborn, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.

Conservatives don’t give a shit about you until you reach “military age”. Then they think you are just fine. Just what they’ve been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life… pro-life… These people aren’t pro-life, they’re killing doctors! What kind of pro-life is that? What, they’ll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it? They’re not pro-life. You know what they are? They’re anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don’t like them. They don’t like women. They believe a woman’s primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state”

Suicide

“Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.”

According to commonweathfund.org, the US has the highest suicide rate of any wealthy nation. And though this topic is quite sensitive and people don’t like to talk about it, recently it has come into the spotlight. Especially with a focus on youth suicide and dealing with mental illness.

Goerge Carlin pokes fun at the act of suicide, the way society deals with it, and the exploitation of the media and pop culture.

From his 2006 special, Life is Worth Losing:

Right this second some guy is getting ready to bite the big bazooka. Because statistics show that every year a million people commit suicide. A million. That’s 2800 a day. That’s one every 30 seconds [checks his watch]

There goes another guy. And I say guy, I say guy because men are four times more likely than women to commit suicide. Even though women attempt it more. So men are better at it. That’s something else you gals will want to be working on. Well, if you want to be truly equal, you’re going to have to start taking your own lives in greater numbers.

What we have to do is build up a large pool of hopeless people. Suicide volunteers. People with no hope. People whom society has given up on. Fate has given up on or who have given up on themselves. Rock bottom. Dead end. Totally fucked-up people with no hope and no reason to live. Now we got our share of them.

The pyramid of the hopeless. We are going to start building this pyramid at the very base, naturally. And the bottom layer is going to be homeless people. God knows we’ve got plenty of them. Nobody gives a fuck about them. Nobody’s got a plan. Nobody’s got any money. Nobody’s got a program. Nobody gives a fuck about homeless people. We don’t know how many we have even. We know 500,000 of them are veterans. Because we’re so good to the veterans in this country. And we know about a 1,400,000 of them are children.

There, so we got a million and a half children. And then God knows how many more we got. Totally fucking hopeless — [fart sound] — in the pyramid they go! Now, the next group we are going to put in here, these are the people in prison with these long sentences they’ve been given. Many of them deserved. I’ll grant you that. I’m sure half the people in prison are in there for things they really did. That’s not a bad average. One out of two. But nobody gives a shit about these people. Nobody’s going to hire them if they do get out. They’re never going to get out. Rehabilitation doesn’t work. And the judges give them these fucking draconian sentences. 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 year sentences. Life term. Double life. One guy about a month ago was given three consecutive life terms. Plus two death penalties. How the fuck do you serve that? Then you got the people on death row. They ain’t going anywhere — [fart sound] — In the fucking pyramid they go!

Now, the next layer, this group is self-selected. Self-selected and a bit controversial to some ears, I guess. These are the people who claim to be depressed, okay? Apparently in this land of plenty, this richest nation in the history world we’re so proud of saying that. Some supermarkets have a hundred thousand items in them. We have 19 million Americans claiming to be depressed. And some of them take medicine for it. Sometimes the medicine makes one of them commit suicide and that depresses the shit out of the rest of them. Then you have these people who only think they’re depressed. They think they’re depressed because they saw the commercial on TV and the doctor looked like a good guy, the music sounded kind of peppy and what the fuck, some of these pills will probably just pick me right up. Totally fucking hopeless mindset — [fart sound] — In the fucking pyramid!

Up at the very top we are gonna put the people who are truly sick. The terminally ill. Unfortunately, no hope for a lot of them. Hundreds of thousands of them. There’s no cure for what they have. Some of them say there is no cure because nobody’s looking for one. There ain’t enough people sick with it so there ain’t no money in the fucking cure. Then there’s people who’ve got… there’s a cure, but they don’t have the money for it. There are the other ones there’s a cure but they’re too far gone. There’s other ones there’s a cure but there is no social means to get to it. So these people ain’t going anywhere. They should be allowed to commit suicide.

Censorship

“By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.”

George Carlin caused a big legal discussion which made its way to the Supreme court when he did a comedy bit about the “Seven Dirty Words” and the FCC got involved. His use of these curse words brought on a lawsuit that ended with the government being able to censor content deemed indecent. There was even a phrase coined “The Carlin Warning” as a warning to other comedians of what was and wasn’t okay for broadcast.

From his album, Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics, George Carlin uses political correctness and the example of feminists to show how government and society continue to censor people and language. Poking fun at cancel culture before it was a thing, Carlin can see how communication is a powerful tool that countries, companies, and powerful people try to stifle and control. He says,

Feminists want to control your language. Feminists want to tell you how to talk. And they’re not alone. Their not alone. I’m not picking on the feminists. They got a lot of company in this country. There’s a lot of groups, a lot of institutions in this country want to control your language. Tell you what you can say and what you can’t say. Government wants to tell you some things you can’t say because it’s against the law. Well you can’t say this because it’s against the regulation. Well here’s something you can’t say because it’s a secret. “You can’t tell him that, because he’s not clear to know that.” Government wants to control information and control language, because that’s the way you control thought…and basically that’s the game they’re in.

Same with political groups of all kinds, political activists, anti- bias groups, special interest groups, are going to suggest the correct political vocabulary. The way you ought to be saying things, and that’s where the feminists come in.

As I said, I got nothing against the feminists. In fact, I happen to agree with most of the feminist philosophy I have read. I agree for instance, that for the most part, men are vain, ignorant, greedy, brutal assholes who’ve just about ruined this planet…who’ve just…who’ve just about ruined this planet because they’re afraid someone might have a bigger dick out there somewhere.

Religion

I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.

Though born Catholic, Carlin rejected not only Christianity but all religions in general. His ideas of believing in an invisible entity, the rules and regulations forced upon followers, and the use of religion as a way to deceive and fraud people and organizations were eye-opening. Using his own experiences, stories from history, and current events, Carlin makes us laugh at the absurdity of believing in religion as fact.

From the album, You Are All Diseased, 1999

When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!

War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you’d expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently-run universe, this guy would’ve been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And by the way, I say “this guy”, because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man.

No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this. So, if there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he’s at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn’t give a shit. Doesn’t give a shit, which I admire in a person, and which would explain a lot of these bad results.

So rather than be just another mindless religious robot, mindlessly and aimlessly and blindly believing that all of this is in the hands of some spooky incompetent father figure who doesn’t give a shit, I decided to look around for something else to worship.

Environment

“The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”

At first, when you hear the comedy of George Carlin, he often mocks environmentalists, people trying to protect the environment, and animals as hippies or crazy. But the more you listen to his rants about the environment and the negative effect that people are having on the earth, you realize he is blaming humans. He talks about the earth being ruined by humans but ultimately being able to overcome the destruction we cause. He feels our carnage will ultimately be our demise.

From George Carlin: Jamming In New York (1992)

Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet… nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine… the people are fucked! Difference! The planet is fine! Compared to the people, THE PLANET IS DOING GREAT: Been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years, we’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat? That somehow, we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun?

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?

The planet isn’t going anywhere… we are! We’re going away! Pack your shit folks! We’re going away and we won’t leave much of a trace either, thank God for that… maybe a little styrofoam… maybe… little styrofoam. The planet will be here, we’ll be long gone; just another failed mutation; just another closed-end biological mistake; an evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance.

You wanna know how the planet’s doing? Ask those people in Pompeii who are frozen into position from volcanic ash how the planet’s doing. Wanna know if the planet’s all right? Ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. How about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii who build their homes right next to an active volcano and then wonder why they have lava in the living room?

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: The Earth plus Plastic.

What would you do if you were the planet trying to defend against this pesky, troublesome species? Let’s see… what might… hmm… viruses! Viruses might be good. They seem vulnerable to viruses. And uh… viruses are tricky; always mutating and forming new strains whenever a vaccine is developed.

Perhaps this first virus could be one that-that compromises the immune system of these creatures. Perhaps a human immunodeficiency virus making them vulnerable to all sorts of other diseases and infections that might come along and maybe it could be spread sexually, making them a little reluctant to engage in the act of reproduction.

Despite being a middle-class, white, privileged male who gained vast amounts of fortune from his career, George Carlin was anti-government, anti-establishment, and pro-equality. His activist mind always questioned what society said was natural or normal and always went against the grain of those in power.

Sometimes his opinions weren’t popular, and often he had to defend his positions from those who tried to cancel him. But without a doubt, Carlin was a fighter of free speech, freedom of choice, and the rights for everyone despite, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. His ideas have lived on and are still relevant today.

This article also appears at: https://medium.com/fml-or-bust/5-social-issues-george-carlin-made-relevant-3ca7ef5f80b1