My favorite comic, George Carlin, kicked it last night (George, if you were in my address book, your six weeks would start today. I only wish I’d known you well enough to be able to erase you from the address book in six weeks) I’d like to make it to 71 myself, so I’m not going to shed too many tears for his passing. 71 ain’t half bad, I’d settle for that.
Still, I remember a bit that he did ages ago when the “no heroic efforts” directives to doctors and hospitals were making headlines, and his take on the subject was predictably non-conformist. Of the hundreds of clips on YouTube, none of them feature the segment that I remember, and I’m not going to attempt to paraphrase the master from memory.
Suffice it to say, If there was one more tube available to plug into some hole or other on the man, maybe he’d still be with us.
Upon his death HBO broadcast 11 of his 14 HBO specials from June 25 to 28, including a 12-hour marathon block on their HBO Comedy channel. NBC scheduled a rerun of the premiere episode of Saturday Night Live, which Carlin hosted. Both Sirius Satellite Radio’s “Raw Dog Comedy” and XM Satellite Radio’s “XM Comedy” channels ran a memorial marathon of George Carlin recordings the day following his death. Larry King devoted his entire show of June 23 to a tribute to Carlin, featuring interviews with Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Maher, Roseanne Barr and Lewis Black, as well as Carlin’s daughter Kelly and his brother, Patrick Jr. On June 24, The New York Times printed an op-ed piece on Carlin by Jerry Seinfeld. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau paid tribute in his Doonesbury comic strip on July 27.
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