July 3, 2008

Everybody keeps asking me whether George Carlin was Jewish. “I heard he was related to the Karlin-Stoliner rebbe,” a colleague said about the comedian who died last week at the age of 71.

No, not unless the Karlin-Stoliner rebbe’s family was really Irish and Catholic.

We assume Carlin was Jewish not just because his surname is Jew-ish but because his comedy confronted the status quo, the government, the elite, the insiders. He was right up there in the tradition of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Howard Stern — the tummler who doesn’t just want the world to laugh; he wants the world to change.

In Carlin’s classic routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” he dismantled the idea that a government responsible for Vietnam and Watergate had a right to tell us what was obscene. It was such an obvious and threatening concept, he was arrested at least once after performing it and charged with violating — what else? — obscenity laws.

I was 11 when I first heard that routine, listening to my brother’s copy of Carlin’s Class Clown LP in our bedroom. I played it over and over, like a lot of people in my generation. It was liberation comedy, pointing out hypocrisy and greed in our society in a way that even an 11-year-old could understand.

I have been trying to compile a list of performers who’ve been dragged offstage by authorities, persecuted by the government, or banned by media conglomerates not because of what they did — drugs, underage girls, etc. — but because of what they had said. By my count, most of these renegades have been Jewish.

It’s not a long list, but there was Bruce, of course. And Stern fought with the Federal Communications Commission and the Christian Right, which in his case may well be one and the same. There’s Joan Rivers, who’s been banned and re-banned by several shows. And then there’s Carlin, part of the same elite club.

Carlin didn’t stop with government. He went after religion; he went after God. What’s more Jewish than that? The ability to take a fresh look — and by fresh, I also mean crude and challenging — at beliefs we have grown comfortable with is another Jewish comic tradition. Ask Woody Allen; ask Bill Maher.
Carlin wasn’t Jewish, but as he looked to Bruce, so generations of Jewish comic soothsayers looked to him. He begat — or at least cleared the way — for Richard Belzer, Roseanne Barr, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, and Jon Stewart.

When I watched Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm try to steal a nail used in The Passion of the Christ to put up his mezuza, I couldn’t help thinking that Carlin’s incendiary statements hadn’t just cleared the way, but bulldozed the boulevard.

Before stand-up, Jews put their observations in print. The comic essayist Karl Kraus — a big deal in fin de siecle Austria — nurtured his rage by reading the morning paper, and then turned loose his pen. More than half a century later, the microphone became a way to share the anger, through humor, with the masses.

Carlin had that Jewish talent — standing at a remove from the larger culture and commenting astutely on it. What he was doing on stage, Mel Brooks was doing on film, Norman Lear on television, and Stern on radio.

As Carlin became famous and rich and lionized, he didn’t lose his ability to get angry and funny, to rail against the hypocrites of the Left and Right, the politicians and clergy and businessmen, the environmentalists and the polluters. “I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn,” he said, “and cross it deliberately.”

That’s why it’s not out of line to say a little Kaddish for Carlin.

Rob Eshman is the editor of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, where a version of this essay first appeared.

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