George Carlin against the universe

BY ROBBY O'CONNOR

"I haven't prepared a thing, much like my own academic career," George Carlin boasted as he paced the stage of the Yale University Art Gallery lecture hall. The 63-year-old comedian was brought to Yale on Mon., Feb. 12 through the combined efforts of Pierson and the Yale Record and spoke for over an hour to a packed auditorium, dividing his time between telling the earliest chapters of his life story and answering questions.

Carlin gained his notoriety in the '70s thanks to the infamous "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" routine and the Supreme Court's adverse reaction to it. When asked what he thought of his ordeal (the case stayed in the courts for five years), Carlin answered, "I like being a footnote in American legal history. Five to four [justices] ain't bad."

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH The master. 'Nuff said.

Carlin's new-found celebrity status landed him guest host honors for the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live (Carlin recalled, "I was full of cocaine. It was a terrible performance"). Over the years, he's acted in countless movies and television shows, received10 Grammy nominations for his comedy albums, and written several books. Nevertheless, to Monday's audience he will forever be known as Rufus, his character from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, as well as Mr. Conductor from PBS's Shining Time Station (here placed Ringo Starr).

Beginning with the story of how his parents met, Carlin held the audience captive with his tale of his near brush with death at the hands of "Dr. Sunshine...my mother's code name for the abortionist. "Fortunately for Comedy Central, his mother saw the image of her mother in one of the paintings in the waiting room, "much the way people see Jesus in the hairs of the shower drain" and changed her mind. "I was roughly 50 feet from the drain pipe...And by the way, I still support abortion though I was nearly done in by it."

Carlin also elaborated on his critical view of religion. He said, "I think that religion does a real disservice and is a dehumanizing instrument," a blanket statement met with a surprising amount of applause. "We all have this wonderful brain which somehow came to be, but it's always pursued two limiting things. One, an invisible man in the sky who watches and keeps score. Really, it's primitive. And two, the relentless pursuit of material gain." Enumerating all the things people think they need, he was particularly disgusted by tequila-flavored lollypops containing worms.

Breaking into the manic, breakneck pacing of his stand-up routine, Carlin explained that the Ten Commandments can really be reduced to two if you throw away the bullshit ones and condense the similar ones. "I don't think you should outlaw thinking about another guy's wife, or else what are you going to think about when you're jerking off?" he said.

What Carlin left us with of the original 10 was simple: "Thou shalt always be honest and true to the source of thy nookie," and "Thou shalt try not to kill anyone...unless they deserve it. Really, Moses could have kept these in his pocket, and the Alabama courthouse could put them up with one other: `Thou shalt keep thy mother-fucking religion to thy mother-fucking self.'"

Carlin proceeded to walk down the memory lane of his short-lived academic career, recalling his two expulsions—one for stealing money from a visiting basketball team's lockers and later from another school for peddling fake heroin. In order to regain admittance to the earlier institution, Carlin had to write the school play. "It was called Spending Leisure Time and was a morality play about kids getting into trouble, which was basically the only thing I knew about." After three semesters of high school, Carlin and academics went their separate ways. He went on to the Air Force, where he finally got his entrance into the entertainment industry as a disc jockey. His words of advice for those interested in pursuing this sort of career: "Dreams come true. Cling to them. Do what you can with them."

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