George Carlin...

Before I type another word, let me openly, freely, and gladly say what you might be thinking; who in hell am I to eulogize a giant like George Carlin?

I have no right. Really, no right at all, no standing, none.

Like millions of others, though, I was a fan, a huge fan. As such, maybe a few thoughts are at least OK.

It wasn't all that long ago that I wrote a paragraph or two about George Carlin, and of how he could still make tears roll down my cheeks more than forty years after I'd seen him for the first time.

At the time, what popped into my head was that Parade Day in Scranton was such a spectacle that it could probably give him ample material for three separate hour-long HBO Specials.

And I don't for one second think that any of Carlin's observations on Scranton's annual weekend rites of being Irish would have made any friendly sons or daughters very happy.

Carlin was Irish, used to be Catholic, grew up in the "New York City Irish Culture," and I do believe there is such a thing, yet didn't seem particularly proud to be Irish.

Not at all unproud, as in ashamed or embarrassed, mind you, just not much impressed by the roll of the ethnic dice that brings us all to where we are today.

Carlin also had trouble with "God Bless The Irish!" Why the Irish alone, he asked. I understood.

"God Bless America!" Great, what about the rest of the world? That bothered him, too. Same here.

It is indeed presumptuous of me to write something, anything, about a man who I believe to be one of the funniest who's ever lived. Granted, admitted, confessed, I have no idea what passed for funny, oh, two hundred years ago, or really even a hundred years ago. Sixty or seventy years ago what Americans laughed at wasn't really funny.

Why do you think Vaudeville faded away? It didn't go out of style, people just one day realized that what those slapstickers up on stage were doing wasn't really funny.

Some years later, Americans finally admitted that The Lucy Show wasn't funny, neither was Bewtiched, when you got right down to it.

God forbid I say it, but Gilligan's Island was never funny. Today, we love those shows for one reason; they bring back our childhood, in turn making us all warm and fuzzy.

Carlin was never warm and fuzzy. Funny he was. He was funny from the very beginnings of the 60s, then on through the 70s, 80s, 90s, and right up until his last edgy performance, little more than a week before he died.

George Carlin was funny. American knew he was funny as long as forty years ago. It might be closer to fifty years ago. I first saw him on The Ed Sullivan Show. He was funny. Straight, clean, and clean-shaven with short hair, he was fall-down funny.

Now all I keep hearing is him referred to as a "counterculture hero." I don't think that's quite right. It's not adequate to pidgeon-hole him as some sort of "funny hippy." If he was a hero to some counterculture, it was a counterculture he himself created, controlled, and ruled.

It's also a counterculture populated by most living and breathing Americans. If that be true, and I propose it is, no such counterculture exists. It couldn't.

Last week, I watched Larry King's hour devoted to Carlin. Clearly, Mr. King was a big fan. He'd had Carlin on many times, where he managed to get him to be himself, to engage him in honest conversation. A lot of comics can't do that. Take away their rehearsed, studied, and honed routine, and they're naked. The don't know quite what to say, or how to say it. They seem to have trouble being themselves, which just might be why they became comedians in the first place.

Jerry Seinfeld hopped on via satellite with King. Seinfeld, and I'm not an un-fan, seemed lost, bewildered, and uncomfortable. The one-on-one interview is not Seinfeld's venue.

King was joined live in-studio by Bill Maher. Maher was a completely different story. Very comfortable, more than capable of answering direct questions.

Maher said one thing that really struck me, one thing that turned my attention even tighter.

Lenny Bruce's name inevitably crept into the conversation. I knew it would, I could feel it coming.

For forty years so many have rigidly drawn so many parallells betwen Carlin and Bruce. The comparisons have become routine and predictable. I missed Bruce by a couple years, I'm just a little too young(even at 58) to remember his career hitting apogee before self-destruction. I have, however, seen movies, watched old film clips, and sat through several of Bruce's archived routines.

What Bill Maher said was that Lenny Bruce wasn't funny, but George Carlin was. I agree.

Lenny Bruce's strength was in having the nerve to stand on a stage and lob F-Bombs at the audience. Absent the F-Bombs, Bruce really wasn't funny. That's what Maher said. That's also what I have long thought of Lenny Bruce.

Bold, groundbreaking, cutting edge, courageous...but not particularly funny. Tragic, heroic, compelling in his sincerity, but simply not funny.

Then came Carlin. Early on, no F-Bombs, yet funny. As he grew and matured, bring on the F-Bombs. No one used an F-Bomb like George Carlin. He was masterful in their use. To me, it's obvious why his use of profanity was so effective; it wasn't just profanity, it was profanity used properly, woven within incredibly funny material.

George Carlin is dead. There isn't another George Carlin out there. I doubt there ever will be.

And if George Patrick Denis Carlin was as honest with us as he led us to believe, he really doesn't much care that he's dead.