Exit Funny
Here we are again! It’s another week, another dollar – or in my case – barely another dime. I don’t know anyone who will openly claim that they are paid enough at their current jobs for the amount of work (or crap) they do. I don’t know J.Lo personally, but I suspect she wakes up and thinks; another day, another 2.5 million. Must be nice.
Mondays suck!
When I got up this morning and reached over to turn on the radio, the very first thing I heard was that comedian George Carlin was dead of heart failure at 71 years of age. Before I met Joe, I really was not familiar with Carlin or his work. However, Carlin once visited Queens College and Joe and I attended his event. He was a riot! I could barely sit upright, I was laughing so hard.
Carlin was a raunchy son of a gun. No subject was too taboo for this guy. Yet, he was also politically informative, academically intelligent and right on about so many things we all think, but never dare to say. If you were willing to peel away the layers of curse words and acerbic commentary, you would find that George Carlin was the every-day speaker of the house. No, not that house! He was the blow horn of the House of the American People. He was the mouthpiece for what was plaguing our thoughts and our society in any given decade. I say decade because Mr. Carlin and his comedy routine had a long, impressive career. In the 50s he was on radio, he played opposite Mary Tyler Moore on “That Girl” on 60s TV and was Saturday Night Live’s first ever celebrity host. He went on everything from the Ed Sullivan Show to hosting his own highly praised HBO specials.
Some folks might have found Carlin’s style of comedy hard to stomach. In fact, throughout his career he was arrested a few times and banned a few other times for crossing the line drawn by the powers of the FCC. He paid them no mind. He was a comedic renegade and would speak out no matter who his audience. He gave up his early-career clean-cut image long ago and replaced it – reinventing himself before Madonna thought to lose her Boy Toy belt and pointy bras – with his trademark long hair, scruffy beard, jeans and laid back attitude.
Although I was not a big follower of, or even considered myself a fan of, Mr. Carlin, I could see his relevance in our lives. He was the every-man’s comic. His frustrations – with the establishment, with our politicians, with rules and the law – were our own. He had mass appeal because just when you were thinking that the mayor in your town was a scummy bastard who swindled people for fun, Carlin was already pointing out the culprit and waiting for a reaction.
Like any human, he had his demons. Drug use plagued him throughout his life and he would often use his struggles with legal and illegal narcotics, as well as alcohol abuse in his routines. If you can’t beat 'em, join 'em. In his case – If you can’t beat it, write it, stand up, and say it! Fear no one!
Carlin won a Grammy and took bit parts here and there in films throughout his career. You could say he did all he could do as a comic and celebrity, but I know there was a lot more “funny” left in that man that will forever go unheard now. A lot of the political nonsense, economic struggles and battles we face today would have ended up in his routine playing in some random comedy club or coffee house somewhere in Anytown, USA.
Despite all of Carlin’s achievements, what I admired most was his fearlessness. Too bad he couldn’t bottle that up and sell it. I’d have been first in line to buy it! This man was gutsy! He put it all out there – how he felt, what made him angry, what made him laugh and what made him sick. His was a comedy of no holds barred attitude. Gustiness like his allows people to get far in life. He is a prime example of that.
If you hold back all that you are and all that you know you are capable of becoming or doing, you’re short changing yourself. If you live in fear of what people will say, what people will do and how people will feel, you will always lead a guarded and very limited existence. However, if you put yourself out there with the 100% unfiltered truth, you will probably garner more respect than if you hold back all the time. If you only say the nice things that you think people want to hear from you, nothing that you ever do will be authentic or worthy of praise. Filters are good, but they have their place.
That last paragraph was purely for my own use. I need to verbalize, if only via words typed into a computer, to myself the importance of being brazen in my writings. I have no doubt that a lot of what holds me back from stepping up to the publishing plate is nothing more than fear. I need to address my fear of truth and become bold and aggressive in achieving my goals. I have this inability to purposely hurt or embarrass people using my words as weapon. I have a fear of what people will say and think of me if I put it all out there.
Regardless of how I think I will be perceived going forward, I have to place my feet firmly on the ground, stick out my chest, stand firm in my beliefs and write. Otherwise, I will live forever in the shadow of the person I know I can become. I know who I am already – I am an author of great books. I know that stories run haphazardly through me and need only to find focus and direction to spill out from me and pour into book form.
If George Carlin had spent his life worried about what people would think and say about him and his comedy, we would have missed a bunch of years of laughing and knee slapping at his expense. Think about what would have happened if, while writing his stand-up routine, he used a pencil, instead of a pen, and erased whatever he thought would be offensive to some in his audience? What would have happened if he did not have that To-hell-with-it attitude? Would he have been as funny, as authentic and as relevant year after year and decade after decade? Surely, the world would have missed a lot. This comic genius, whose writings and ramblings about the regular guy’s woes and worries, would have been silenced before he was ever heard. The very prolific and very funny man stood out there before it was popular, or even safe, to be that critical, that controversial and that honest about our leaders and people in general. He did not hold a damn thing back. If he felt it, he wrote it and then he performed it. No one can ever say about George Carlin that he held back in the face of authority. When he drew his last breath, at the very least, he went content knowing he had the last laugh. We should all be so bold!
Mondays suck!
When I got up this morning and reached over to turn on the radio, the very first thing I heard was that comedian George Carlin was dead of heart failure at 71 years of age. Before I met Joe, I really was not familiar with Carlin or his work. However, Carlin once visited Queens College and Joe and I attended his event. He was a riot! I could barely sit upright, I was laughing so hard.
Carlin was a raunchy son of a gun. No subject was too taboo for this guy. Yet, he was also politically informative, academically intelligent and right on about so many things we all think, but never dare to say. If you were willing to peel away the layers of curse words and acerbic commentary, you would find that George Carlin was the every-day speaker of the house. No, not that house! He was the blow horn of the House of the American People. He was the mouthpiece for what was plaguing our thoughts and our society in any given decade. I say decade because Mr. Carlin and his comedy routine had a long, impressive career. In the 50s he was on radio, he played opposite Mary Tyler Moore on “That Girl” on 60s TV and was Saturday Night Live’s first ever celebrity host. He went on everything from the Ed Sullivan Show to hosting his own highly praised HBO specials.
Some folks might have found Carlin’s style of comedy hard to stomach. In fact, throughout his career he was arrested a few times and banned a few other times for crossing the line drawn by the powers of the FCC. He paid them no mind. He was a comedic renegade and would speak out no matter who his audience. He gave up his early-career clean-cut image long ago and replaced it – reinventing himself before Madonna thought to lose her Boy Toy belt and pointy bras – with his trademark long hair, scruffy beard, jeans and laid back attitude.
Although I was not a big follower of, or even considered myself a fan of, Mr. Carlin, I could see his relevance in our lives. He was the every-man’s comic. His frustrations – with the establishment, with our politicians, with rules and the law – were our own. He had mass appeal because just when you were thinking that the mayor in your town was a scummy bastard who swindled people for fun, Carlin was already pointing out the culprit and waiting for a reaction.
Like any human, he had his demons. Drug use plagued him throughout his life and he would often use his struggles with legal and illegal narcotics, as well as alcohol abuse in his routines. If you can’t beat 'em, join 'em. In his case – If you can’t beat it, write it, stand up, and say it! Fear no one!
Carlin won a Grammy and took bit parts here and there in films throughout his career. You could say he did all he could do as a comic and celebrity, but I know there was a lot more “funny” left in that man that will forever go unheard now. A lot of the political nonsense, economic struggles and battles we face today would have ended up in his routine playing in some random comedy club or coffee house somewhere in Anytown, USA.
Despite all of Carlin’s achievements, what I admired most was his fearlessness. Too bad he couldn’t bottle that up and sell it. I’d have been first in line to buy it! This man was gutsy! He put it all out there – how he felt, what made him angry, what made him laugh and what made him sick. His was a comedy of no holds barred attitude. Gustiness like his allows people to get far in life. He is a prime example of that.
If you hold back all that you are and all that you know you are capable of becoming or doing, you’re short changing yourself. If you live in fear of what people will say, what people will do and how people will feel, you will always lead a guarded and very limited existence. However, if you put yourself out there with the 100% unfiltered truth, you will probably garner more respect than if you hold back all the time. If you only say the nice things that you think people want to hear from you, nothing that you ever do will be authentic or worthy of praise. Filters are good, but they have their place.
That last paragraph was purely for my own use. I need to verbalize, if only via words typed into a computer, to myself the importance of being brazen in my writings. I have no doubt that a lot of what holds me back from stepping up to the publishing plate is nothing more than fear. I need to address my fear of truth and become bold and aggressive in achieving my goals. I have this inability to purposely hurt or embarrass people using my words as weapon. I have a fear of what people will say and think of me if I put it all out there.
Regardless of how I think I will be perceived going forward, I have to place my feet firmly on the ground, stick out my chest, stand firm in my beliefs and write. Otherwise, I will live forever in the shadow of the person I know I can become. I know who I am already – I am an author of great books. I know that stories run haphazardly through me and need only to find focus and direction to spill out from me and pour into book form.
If George Carlin had spent his life worried about what people would think and say about him and his comedy, we would have missed a bunch of years of laughing and knee slapping at his expense. Think about what would have happened if, while writing his stand-up routine, he used a pencil, instead of a pen, and erased whatever he thought would be offensive to some in his audience? What would have happened if he did not have that To-hell-with-it attitude? Would he have been as funny, as authentic and as relevant year after year and decade after decade? Surely, the world would have missed a lot. This comic genius, whose writings and ramblings about the regular guy’s woes and worries, would have been silenced before he was ever heard. The very prolific and very funny man stood out there before it was popular, or even safe, to be that critical, that controversial and that honest about our leaders and people in general. He did not hold a damn thing back. If he felt it, he wrote it and then he performed it. No one can ever say about George Carlin that he held back in the face of authority. When he drew his last breath, at the very least, he went content knowing he had the last laugh. We should all be so bold!
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