George Carlin And Richard Pryor: A Very Minor Appreciation

Found out a little while ago from some MySpace friends' bulletins that Mr. George Carlin died of heart failure in Los Angeles, California, last night at the age of 71.

Already said quite a bit about Mr. Carlin, and his contemporary, Mr. Richard Pryor, in my responses to those bulletins there, so will keep this as short and to the point as I can.

What I came to most appreciate about 'em is that they both started out as more-or-less typical journeyman comedians/actors of their day in the early and mid-1960s, but they were able to break away from the more commercially-oriented and "safer" material in their routines by 1968-69, and start tackling issues of race, class, sex, language, politics and many other issues in their stand-by comedy routines that would have been generally thought to be unwise even a year or two earlier.

They surely weren't the only ones, either in the US, UK, or other parts of the world, to do this. Rather, they were part of wave of change in world comedy, as in world culture in general, in those areas.

But, I would say that Messrs Carlin and Pryor were, from their respective ends, pretty substantial parts of that wave of comedic change, and that they had the right amount of guts and intelligence, at the right time in history, to be a part of that change, and, in turn, to help change not only American comedy, but American culture, at least a bit for the better and more honest.

So, here's good-bye to Mr. George Carlin, and, even though dead a few years before him, Mr. Richard Pryor. The both of you helped make American comedy a better, more honest, artistic form than it otherwise would have been, and helped make, even in spite of ourselves at times, at least some parts of American society and culture truer and better than they would otherwise have been.

Not too shabby an achievement, I think.

Here Endeth The Lesson, and Be Seeing You.