This latest book from George Carlin consists of many, many short riffs about language, skits involving lots of profanity and potty humor, and commentary about various things that for the most part just piss Carlin off. I listened to an unabridged audio version of it via Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). The audio book is over 7 hours long and is read by Carlin himself. The book is available in print as well, of course. I’ve found that Carlin is great in short doses, and so I found myself only listening to 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, etc. Maybe the longest listen was an hour. I find some of what Carlin has to say very insightful, and some of it is also very funny, but not all of it, of course. A lot of what he has to say is also meant to be fairly offensive. You can tell that Carlin is trying to push buttons mostly with a lot of his shtick. For example, there’s a lot of what could be deemed as sexist jokes, but there are also parts of the book where Carlin talks about how women are superior to men in most ways and are also crapped on throughout the world for the sole reason that they aren’t as physically strong.
I would say a majority of the book is about language and specifically about euphemisms, which Carlin finds repugnant, because they “water down” the language and make a lot of things “meaningless” by couching them in kinder sounding words or phrases that don’t impart truth or real meaning. There’s a lot of truth to this, but Carlin does belabor the point, and after a while I was starting to say, “Ok, I get the point already!”
He also has a lot of these little “skits” where he will make up a conversation among a couple of people. Some of these are funny, some aren’t. A lot are graphic, gross, “dirty” or in various ways the opposite of “political correctness.” As I said, he definitely is out to try to offend just about anyone.
There’s also some insightful stuff about politics, the irony of various political issues, how politicians are constantly trying to deceive us, and a lot of times doing so by use of language.
Of course there’s a lot about various things, not all language-related, that simply piss Carlin off. Some of these are just silly and obviously not to be taken seriously, some are things that most of us would probably find annoying, or at least will once Carlin enlightens us as to why they are so dumb.
I’ve mainly seen Carlin in some older stand-up routines, a couple of movies, and one other book, Napalm and Silly Puddy, so I don’t know if I’m familiar enough with his stuff to comment on how this book compares to earlier work. It was an interesting listen, one with some laugh-out-lound moments, no doubt, but also some interesting thoughts, and a lot of expounding on random stuff that made it a bit repetitive. I wonder if for books like this, a very strategic audio abridgement might actually make it a much more solid listen?
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