You could say I grew up watching George Carlin.
He was always my favorite rhetoric-ist. The most logical. The most
reasonable. He was in effect my only access to what I now know as the
Trivium.
In my first 25 years of life, George Carlin’s material truly made me
laugh at what could only be defined as Carlin’s hyper-realistic
perspective stand-up routine.
It was the most harsh and abusive form of
truth intervention for the entire human species – and yet it was masked
brilliantly as comedy.
At around age 25, I attended an event in Las Vegas that was the
beginning of my own transformation and incremental arrival into the
over-exposure of hyper-reality Carlin spewed. This event was George
Carlin, live at the Bally’s Casino resort. How wondrously excited I was
to see up close and personal one of my few Idols in life. And the show
went on…
But something was different.
Something just didn’t feel right.
George wasn’t the problem, for he was delivering his material just as
rehearsed-ly as he always had, mentally re-ciphering eerily associative
memory poems with endless lists of material and anecdotal stories with
an almost autistic flair.
No, the problem laid elsewhere… It was the crowd. And it was myself.
I realize now as I listen to archives of the HBO and large older
productions of Carlin’s televised stand-up routines that the audiences
were given a bit of help. Laugh tracks were used to either replace or
augment the seemingly jovial nature of the large audiences. Years of
working in Hollywood sound departments helped my ears confirm the false
stereo and room placement effect of certain “callers” within the
otherwise echo-effected hall – their outbursts were out of place and
sometimes non-situational. In other words, fake laughing was added to
create the typical sitcom fake audience.
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2 comments:
Fantastic post Mami
thanks Griz, I sure look at his comedy in a different light now. He was a genius. RIP George
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