Like some of the best comedic voices of our time, artists finely tuned to the realities that define contemporary society, in Carlin, what appears to some as the prototypical outbursts of a nihilist, are... in actuality... the pained cries of a badly disappointed humanist constantly on the edge of total misanthropy...
Carlin has always included politics as part of his material (along with the wordplay and sex jokes), but by the mid-1980s had become a strident and perceptive social critic, in both his HBO specials and the book compilations of his material. His HBO viewers got an especially sharp taste of this in his take on the Ronald Reagan administration during the 1988 special What Am I Doing In New Jersey? broadcast live from the Park Theatre in Union City, New Jersey.
Carlin, always the rebel, the irrepressible nonconformist in a society where to passively conform is to be complicit in a large catalog of wrongs, crimes, and idiocies, ranging from wholesale mendacity to imperial wars, has gone, true to form, against the current. Thus, while most ordinary souls travel rightward as they acquire more property, Carlin has cheerfully and defiantly traveled left. Now 70, with his sharp wit as cutting and on target as ever, he continues to tell it like it is, cutting through the thick layers of national bullshit as some form of high-octane nuclear laser. He has important warnings to communicate, warnings that we should take to heart, once we stop laughing, that is. He probably wouldn't have it any other way.
George Carlin is a rare national treasure. It's good to know that he's around.
—Patrice Greanville