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Comedian George Carlin dies
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 CALIFORNIA. One of America’s most popular comedians, George Carlin, died yesterday (22 June) of heart failure in Santa Monica at the age of 71. He was famous for his monologue on “seven words you can never say on television”, which – because he used them all in public – resulted in a lawsuit and reached the Supreme Court. It was his wit and wisdom when sharing his thoughts about sex, language and religion that made him special.
The straight-talking comedian, who hated euphemisms, highlighted American attitudes to death with these words:
“Thanks to our fear of death in this country, I won’t have to die ... I’ll pass away. Or I’ll expire like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital, they’ll call it ‘a terminal episode’. The insurance company will refer to it as ‘negative patient care outcome’. And if it’s the result of malpractice, they’ll say it was ‘a therapeutic misadventure’.”
As a boy, Carlin impressed his schoolfriends by apparently possessing amazing paranormal powers. He was able to predict the storylines in their favourite comic books, explaining in detail weeks in advance precisely how their heroes would escape from impossible situations.
The secret was simple. His family all worked in the newspaper industry and his Aunt Aggie, who produced the Philadelphia Bulletin’s Sunday comics section, brought them home four weeks before they were distributed.
Speaking to the National Press Club in Washington in 1999, Carlin said: “It doesn’t sound like much today. But in the days before television, and when you’re eight years old, it was power beyond belief!”
The experience probably helped shape his sceptical views on individuals or organisations claiming special knowledge or powers.
Brought up as a Catholic, he spent much of his life mocking religion. He even invented his own religion -– Frisbeetarianism -– in a newspaper contest. It was based on the belief that when a person dies “his soul gets flung onto a roof, and just stays there”, and cannot be retrieved.
The Grammy-award winning comedian saw humour as the perfect way of saying “No” to authority. “I don’t have any beliefs or allegiances. I don't believe in this country, I don’t believe in religion, or a god, and I don’t believe in all these man-made institutional ideas,” he told Reuters in a 2001 interview.
He also told Playboy in 2005 that he looked forward to an afterlife where he could watch the decline of civilisation on a “heavenly CNN”.
For us at www.ParanormalReview.com, though we don’t agree with all of his pronouncements, Carlin was at his hilarious best in his stage routines (not for the faint-hearted or easily offended) Religion is Bullshit and Carlin on Death. The first ends with him challenging God to prove his existence by striking him dead. Of course, he walks off stage unscathed.
But it was just a matter of time before “God” caught up with him, and he has now departed the world stage, taking his mischievous sense of humour with him and leaving the media pundits to ponder, in similarly humorous vein, what sort of after-life Carlin might be experiencing.
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Posted on Monday, June 23, 2008
Category: Other
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