Six Words You Can’t Say on Television

This is something I saw a couple weeks ago, but never got around to writing until now. On Election Night—I promise this isn’t a political post—I decided to watch The Daily Show’s live coverage on Comedy Central. I had no idea what to expect: maybe the show would be on all night and be less ridiculous than some networks that take themselves seriously (CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc.). The truth is that it was still half an hour long, it still had commercials and it was… sorta live.

During the course of the show, they had a correspondent broadcasting from each party’s headquarters, made possible through the magic of green screens. Yay for magic! Aasif Mandvi was talking about the big celebration in the Romney camp, which they were calling… there were blank spots in the audio as opposed to bleeps, but if they had used bleeps instead, it would have sounded something like this:

*BLEEP* piss *BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP*

To clarify, Jon Stewart said the audio probably cut out completely because Mandvi had just recited the list of George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words”. (I’d write the list on here, but I thought you’d appreciate reading the entire bit plus my grandmother might see this blog entry some day.)

So given the audio feed on Comedy Central, “piss” is now considered acceptable language for television viewers and I’m trying to decide how happy Carlin would be about that. Sure, the list is shorter, but just one word since 1972? What a bunch of *BLEEP*ing squares.

George Carlin: Righteously Indignant Person

George Carlin, one of my favorite comedians, died on June 22nd, 2008. Bummer…

But now that he’s croaked, you’ll find all these blogs and videos on Youtube that say R.I.P. I gotta say that considering the guy didn’t believe in Heaven or Hell, people are being awfully presumptuous about what he’s doing now. Resting in peace? Seriously?

He’s dead! He’d be the first one to tell you (assuming that he was capable of speaking from the grave… and assuming you could hear him through six feet of dirt…) that he’s not resting nor is he in peace. Either his corpse is lying there completely immobile with no semblance of consciousness or awareness attached to it or he’s screaming and banging on the inside of the coffin to let him out. (Personally, I think he’d appreciate the irony of the latter.)

Regardless, I want to take a moment of time to reflect on the happiness and joy that I’ve received while listening to his CDs, watching him on TV and seeing him perform live twice. Those good times may be over—at least the good times that involved new material—but his spirit will live on inside each and every once of us until… wait… that’s right, he’s dead. Never mind.