By By Jesse Cataldo
As abstractions go, obscenity may be one of the hardest to pin down. Where is the line between shocking and inappropriate? The concept is so ambiguous it becomes almost impossible to define. If you’re looking to personify obscenity, well that’s a little bit easier. Twenty-eight years after his first HBO special, George Carlin is probably more synonymous with vulgarity than anyone.
“Life Is Worth Losing,” Carlin’s latest special, aired Saturday night, and once again featured him rolling gleefully in the muck of obscenity. Carlin’s famous seven dirty words, as well as a few others, were dispensed plentifully (this is HBO, after all), in the service of his caustic wit and venom toward just about everyone.
The focus of much of the special was death, with Carlin mourning a lack of modern human sacrifice, while pacing a stage filled with gravestones and fake snow. The centerpiece, a lengthy rumination on suicide, found Carlin digging for absurdity with morbid fascination. He imagined a scenario of scheduling conflicts and difficult rope purchases, envisioned an all-suicide cable network and detailed his diagram of a “pyramid of death.”
Even with the theme of death hanging just behind him, it wasn’t long before Carlin brought the subject back around to life. Eventually, he settled into one of his familiar topics, his disgust with our consumption-based culture. It’s hard to tell who Carlin hates more, the middle class slobs who base lives around eating and buying, or the greedy rich who control the system, although its probably the latter. He’s proud to admit that in cases of natural disaster, he’s the guy rooting for nature.
It’s around this point where Carlin’s routine becomes pinned under the weight of his unceasing, overarching bitterness. While his comedy has always been bogged down in his obsession with foul language, here he similarly becomes too wrapped up in anger. He sacrifices jokes for insults, losing his wit beneath a rising tide of anger.
Carlin was much more poised in 2001’s “Complaints and Grievances,” mocking his perceived sterilization of the English language so effectively that the language itself became part of his absurdist circus, with Carlin as the ringmaster. Here, the ideas get the best of him and it ends with him shouting at everyone, unable to contain his ire. His points and the laughs lose their strength and he comes across as the crabby old man who hates everything.
He ends the special with a fast-paced story of his dreams for an apocalyptic disaster. It begins with a small fire in Los Angeles, escalating into a worldwide conflagration that eventually tears a hole in the fabric of the universe. Out of this hole falls all the dead and their collective dissatisfaction forms a swirling puddle that engulfs the entire universe. Pretty heavy stuff. But as Carlin roams the stage, his voice growing with passion, he seems more like an excited child than an old man.
It’s moments like these, perfect instants of absurdity amidst much heavier musings, that we can see Carlin’s relevance. The world may be dark and depressing, but sometimes it is so ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh. Like a fine wine, Carlin’s malignant bitterness only gets better with age.
Final Grade: B-
