Bye George

Probably the most telling (if only the second or third saddest) aspect of the AP’s eulogy for bearded bawd George Carlin is this one:

The actor Ben Stiller called Carlin “a hugely influential force in stand-up comedy. He had an amazing mind, and his humor was brave, and always challenging us to look at ourselves and question our belief systems, while being incredibly entertaining. He was one of the greats.”

Wait, sorry, that’s not it. Zoolander was so ’90s. Dude ain’t the future of American comedy no more. Not after Night at the Museum (2!). I meant this:

“Nobody was funnier than George Carlin,” said Judd Apatow, director of recent hit comedies such as “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” “I spent half my childhood in my room listening to his records experiencing pure joy. And he was as kind as he was funny.”

There we go. What comedy duo could strike a greater generational contrast than Carlin and Apatow? The best that could be said of Carlin (born 1937, the same year as Hunter S. Thompson) is that he was among the most vulgar of his generation’s uncannily large number of wise vulgarians — along with Thompson count Vonnegut (’22), Wolfe (’31), and Mailer (’23). But times change. Who among the younger ranks truly merits the honorific of Wise Vulgarian beside P.J. O’Rourke (’47)?

Judd Apatow, you say? He of the buttermilk-sweet raunch dressing? I say it just isn’t the same. There’s no glory in using the death of George Carlin as an excuse to denigrate Judd Apatow (and little class), but thankfully I don’t want to denigrate Apatow. Possibly, though, as we reflect on Carlin, we can reflect also on the more general passing away of late-20th-century comedy. In style, tone, and content, it was thoroughly adult humor. Maybe everyone grew up too fast in those days, for a variety of reasons; but it was Horatio Alger all over the place, whereas nowadays comic gold is mined almost exclusively from the manchild in all his variations (see Seth Rogen’s chubby frat boy, Steve Carell’s needy dork bachelor, and Jason Bateman’s ambiguously aspirational young husband; for further fun you can ponder all the gay and metro instantiations of the theme).

This isn’t a blame-laying trip, it’s a consciousness-raising one. Is adult male humor going, well, limp? The characters and predicaments of all the manchildren I referenced above center around sex, so simple virility isn’t the issue. Rather than sex, the question is gender: are we really quite ready for a comedy culture in which the former continues to separate away from the latter? The passing of George Carlin may herald the passing of manly humor in favor of the triumph of the boyish. But give the new kids (ages 18-40) time, right?