BuzzFlash Reviews
George Carlin: It's Bad For Ya! (DVD) Carlin's fourteenth and final special for HBO.
The Last Recorded Stand-up Comedy by George Carlin
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As we watched him prowl the stage, a classic stand-up comedian, in his informal black outfit, it looked like he was going out at the top of his game.
One of the great bonuses in this DVD are a couple of vintage "blasts from the pasts," including a stand-up routine Carlin did on the Jackie Gleason Show in 1969. (Watching Gleason, cigarette in hand, introduce Carlin is as campy as it gets.) The contrast between the young dressed for success comic and the "old f*ck" (as he calls himself) in "It's Bad For Ya!" is like being catapulted fast forward in a time travel capsule.
Carlin first became widely known as the "hippy dippy weatherman." But he evolved into pushing the envelope of humor and taste. He always had a little bit of Lenny Bruce in him.
At 71, in "It's Bad For Ya!", Carlin comes off as a geriatric Louis Black. He doesn't suffer fools or societal convention gladly -- or at all. He had a lot to get off his chest before going to the great beyond. In fact, Carlin's mordant humor on death, the concept of heaven, and formulaic sympathy are sardonically side splitting.
Carlin may have been in physical decline when he taped "It's Bad For Ya!", but he comes off as a pugilist, taking on a boatload of societal conventions and knocking them out one by one.
In an age when most of our comics employ irony and the sly wink (think Stephen Colbert), Carlin maintained an older stand-up comedy tradition of taking your targets head-on.
"It's Bad For Ya!" is a final performance and a final tribute to one of America's greatest comics. Mark Twain would have loved him, as would have Lenny Bruce. That's quite a gap to bridge, but Carlin did it in his own inimitable style: with energy, passion, intelligence and an outsider's view of the human condition.
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