When I first heard that George Carlin had died, one of the first
thoughts I had was how he had, in his own way, lived a life devoted
to the “word,” i.e. the comedic word, and the truth, at least as
Carlin saw it.

Carlin changed comedy and brought a massive amount of laughter into
this world. Time magazine has a good recollection of Carlin’s contribution.
I admired Carlin and relished his incredible insights into the nature of
human existence. He made me laugh and he taught me a lot about how to
think differently from the status quo. He was the embodiment of
Dickinson’s advice to “tell it slant.”

Really, in his own way, Carlin was a great humanist. He didn’t just make
comedy; he took comedy from the nature and foibles and follies of human
existence. Few people have ever been able to see below the surface with
Carlin’s incredible powers of ironic observation, and even fewer have been
as skillful at telling the truth. Carlin was perpetually amazed at what
was their to see and hear from the human comedy, and he was committed to
making those discoveries known.

For example, go to Youtube and find Carlin’s routine on materialism,
which is profoundly labeled “Stuff,” and you’ll be edified, I promise.
(That’s the Christian-ese word for positively influenced by the truth.)
While Carlin’s routines are often too profane for most Christians, they
contain always keen, sometimes breathtaking examples of observation and
ironic truth-telling.

What strikes me as continually ironic is that Carlin and other comedians
have become the truth-tellers of our time, while Christians, especially
in their official capacities as preachers, etc., have become the embodiment
of truth avoidance and truth obscuration. Or, if you’d like to get on the
more cynical bus with me and the Ecclesiastes Band, we’re more known for
being liars about the human journey than we are for telling the truth.
In that sense, I can say a hardy Thank God for George Carlin, who wasn’t
afraid to tell it like it was, even if it totally overturned the tables
so nicely arranged by the orderers of society and the custodian of decent
thought.

Carlin embodied Shakespeare’s ideal of the fool. (See King Lear for details.)
The Fool was a truthteller wrapped in the costume of a clown. Because you had
agreed to submit to his agenda of laughter, you opened yourself up to his
agenda of truth. One of the first conversations between Lear and his fool
includes a death threat, but the Fool is not intimidated, and soon Lear is
begging his Fool to continue being the one person who will tell him the
painful, but precious, truth.

Carlin was often plunged into controversy of his own making. He saw the
hypocrisy of assigning shock value and criminal consequences to words and he
played the trump card of the “7 Words You Can’t Say” routine and changed the
culture. I know there are plenty of Christians who equate the Golden Age of
morality with a lack of profanity, but I’ll have to differ on that one a bit.
Behind Carlin’s crusade to use offensive words was another agenda: an
understanding of words with social, political, racial and religious
significance that were also dangerous to the status quo. Word control was a
form of oppression, and Carlin was the liberator in Fool’s clothing.
Christians should be verry careful before they side with the thought/word
police. What you gonna do when they come for you?

Yes, Carlin took aim at God and religion for most of his career, and if you
can’t laugh at the truth of what he was saying, then I wonder what the truth
means to you. Carlin was a clown, critic and prophet unafraid to point out
the contradictions and embarrassments of religion that most people prefer to
ignore. He was raised Catholic and I heard him give genuine, heartfelt thanks
for his Catholic school education in a recent interview, a gift he assigned to
the Catholic teachers at his school and a gift he appreciated throughout his
life. I have a feeling that Carlin was not so much of an unbeliever in God as
he was a servant of the truth, and that put him on the side of the infidels
most of the time, because too many religious people find untruth and lack of
truth to be useful allies.

But how many people do you know whose abhorrence of religion isn’t because of
what religion confesses to believe as much as how religious people conduct
themselves and their place in the world? While I reject the hysteria of the New
Atheists, I find myself frequently standing with Carlin as he assesses religion.

Yes, Carlin was an unbeliever, but there is a lot not worthy of belief these days,
and a person who loves the truth should stand with the prophets and say so.

I’m not for making atheists our spiritual mentors or encouraging more pastors to
do stand-up, but I am for saying thanks to George Carlin for showing many of us
what it is like to use words with truthful, playful, revealing power. To say thanks
to George Carlin for showing us how to think differntly and to really see what’s
there in front of us all the time. To say thanks to George Carlin for making us
take responsibility for our manipulations of power by manipulating words in a way
that puts the other person down. And thank you to George Carlin for all the many,
many insightful, humane, wonderful laughs.

-Michael Spencer