To quote from an all-time favorite movie:

“Get busy fucking with people, or get busy dying.”

Maybe I’m not remembering precisely the way Andy Dufresne had put it in The Shawshank Redemption, but it’s the way George Carlin sure as hell would have.

And he lived his life that way, too, right up until today, the day he died. Fortunately, as Carlin said, “Thanks to our fear of death in this country, I won’t have to die. I’ll pass away.”

I think I’ve seen and/or own all of Carlin’s HBO specials, have read two or three of his books, and have seen him live three times. During my short stint at stand-up comedy, I found out that had my lazy-ass friends shown up for one particular amateur night as they were supposed to, I would have had the chance to bomb in front of him. (Somehow, I consider this absence of a meeting to be a personal connection. You might think I’m completely full of shit for this reason, but, if we were ever to meet, it’s likely I’d find you pretty much full of shit for entirely different reasons.)

I didn’t like Carlin’s last tour. His comedy had devolved to state of nihilism, or to put it another way: it had evolved logically along a clear, philosophically shitty direction. Pushing the envelope for Carlin eventually meant pushing it in front of a truck, without letting go. He went from mostly critiquing particular human beings to critiquing humanity as such. That, along with what seemed to be a change from humor being his end goal to humorousness merely being a style for semi-philosophical diatribes, led to his final HBO special to be on the boring and highly cynical side.

But as to Carlin’s career, it would be easy to judge him as one of the greatest, as a comedian, as a comedic writer, and as a humorist (which, incidentally, is perhaps the most unfunny word in the English language). Judging his entire life’s work as stand-up comedian, I can think of no one who did it better.

He combined the best of both worlds: a literately expressed appreciation of the idiocies and oddities of human behavior and language, and an appreciation of words like “cunt”. What more is there to love? I miss him already.

(Listen to this great recording with photos from Yahoo, in which he describes his career and how he would like to be remembered after he dies.)