I love hockey. George Carlin did not. His priceless rant on it was “Hockey is not a sport. Hockey is guys trying to beat the crap out of each other while playing with a puck. In that sense it is a higher form of boxing, but it will never be a sport because of the puck. Have you ever heard of a puck outside of a urinal? It’s in there to control the smell! Anything whose main object of play comes from the urinal in a men’s bathroom, cannot be a sport.” You know what? That’s funny.
I last saw George Carlin in November 2006 (I believe) at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. George, in his last few years was a much angrier person. But he was still funny, though sometimes it was an uncomfortable funny like watching Ricky Gervais on The Office. And sometimes he just veered off into commentary that made no attempt to be funny. But it was a good show, a thinking man’s show.
Carlin constantly eviscerated the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, being in the league of the legendary Richard Pryor, especially with his famous routine on the “Seven Words” all of which are taboo on broadcast TV to this day. He said, “And words, you know the seven, don’t you? Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, huh? Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.” You can read the whole routine in this article.
“So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” Carlin told the Associated Press earlier this year.
RIP George