Does George Carlin's 'You Are All Diseased' Actually Suck?

Does It Suck? takes a deeper look at pop cultural artifacts previously adored, unjustly hated, or altogether forgotten, reopening the book on topics that time left behind.

From his 1971 countercultural transformation until his death in 2008, fans and colleagues saw George Carlin as a consistent and incisive bullshit detector for American society. I'm a comic, and in my circles, Carlin is invoked with the reverence of a saint. On his podcast, comedian Todd Glass has his guests "swear to George Carlin" instead of swearing to God when they want to convince everyone they're not kidding around. Carlin is that big of deal.

Unfortunately, stand-up comedy doesn't tend to age well. So much of the humor relies on a contextual understanding that is hard to communicate through time. After a couple years, even the best material can have all the edge and insight of a Cliff Clavin quote in an email forward from your grandmother. Wanting to know if Saint George could avoid this fate, I rewatched Carlin's 1999 HBO special You Are All Diseased. I picked this one because I remember watching it as a kid, but also because 1999 was the last time anything in our society seemed to make any sense. So much of our cultural and political landscape has changed (some might say "gone to shit") in the past 18 years. Would any of this still resonate? More important, would it still seem funny?

There are certainly parts of the special that haven't stood the test of time. I watch hours of stand-up a week at shows and open mics, and, well, most of it sucks. I have a practiced ear for comedy clichés, and there are definitely a lot of those here, even if Carlin was the originator of them. In 2017, Carlin's insistence on "ass rape" as a metaphor for any kind of exploitation, as well as his usage of "cocksucker" for anybody he doesn't like, seem not only homophobic but also trite and uninspired. A lot of the rhetorical scaffolding holding up the punchlines shows its age—the trend in stand-up these days is much more conversational, and Carlin introducing a list of song parodies or some unconnected bits of wordplay make the slight bits feel even slighter. Yet even with this clunky delivery, most of the actual jokes remain pretty solid.

I had already prepared myself to hate a chunk where Carlin talks about fictional restaurant and bar names, a mind-numbingly common premise now (an open mic game: drink every time you hear a "Pho" pun), but his suggestion that TGI Fridays could sell more drinks if they changed their name to "Holy Shit It's Only Wednesday" made me laugh out loud. For all of his reputed darkness, gleeful silliness is just as integral to Carlin's success. His anarchic sense of joy is what's missing from his imitators in political comedy today, those who tend to come off preachy or dour—two things Carlin never was. It's interesting we remember him as a spitter of bile when there's a good chunk of time here devoted to his idea for a television program called "Missy Takes a Big Dump in the Woods."

I thought Carlin's overtly political material might age worse than his absurdity, but that's mostly untrue. Sure, there are some corny Clinton jokes (including the most sexist refutation of Bill Clinton's lechery possible: that he sucks because he didn't think to cheat with somebody hot). There's some talk of the dangerous nonsense of religious dogma that seems a little beside the point now that godless neo-Nazi billionaires run our country. (Really? A man in his 60s just discovered that people make up stories about God?) But the overarching theme of Carlin's material here, that human beings are very afraid—of terrorists, of germs, of God himself—and that we sometimes greatly compromise our own quality of life in service of those fears is just as relevant today as it ever was. When he describes the prospect of a terrorist attack as "exciting" in his opening bit, his stance seems to be that a full life is impossible without some danger, and since some danger is inevitable, we might as well embrace it. It might seem dark on its face, but even Carlin's darkest jokes here ultimately have a sort of groovy, life-affirming perspective that a lot of his imitators sadly lack.

Of course, danger feels even less avoidable now than it did in 1999. It's certainly possible that being able to "lighten up" in the face of it is a luxury that a lot of people don't have. But I don't think Carlin's saying people are wrong to take their survival seriously. Rather, according to Carlin, if you stop having fun and let the autocrats he rails against set up shop in your brain, you might as well be dead already.

Follow Kath Barbadoro on Twitter.