If this is in response to my earlier comment, I think Tony D is correct. Let's just honor George. He was an awesome and rare talent. I think we can all agree on that.
I've been watching the hbo specials marathon on hbo 2, and what i loved is that many of his topics of choice aren't really dated at all, so even stuff that was recorded 15 and 20 years ago are still topical today.
Before his death (and because I was so young when I first heard of him), I best remebered Carlin as both Cardinal Glick from Dogma and Ollie's father in Jersey Girl. But after watching his comedy specials during the tribute that HBO2 and HBO Comedy have been running, I have to admit his stand-up is amazing. His views on the world and what he had to say were not only groundbreaking, but funny as hell.
Too bad i missed SNL this past week. I would've loved to have seen it just becuase he was the host.
RIP George Carlin. You left us with some of the biggest laughs of our life and we will miss you.
It's sad to know that he will never have another HBO special from him. It was HBO that put him on the map and it got him some of the biggest exposure of his career.
I was visiting family in LA the day he died. Earlier in the day, we were discussing George, specifically we were talking about the presidential election and I said George Carlin should run for President, he'd have been a great one.
Then later that night I saw the sad news on my computer.
You will be sorely missed George.
We lost George last week!
P.S. Anyone know if HBO is going to repeat the George Carlin Marathon? I missed that being out of town.
HBO should put out a box set with all 14 George Carlin HBO Comedy Specials. That's not much bigger than one season of their mainstay series such as Sopranos, Six Feet Under, etc.
(07-01) 04:00 PDT Los Angeles -- He was the comedian who actually said the seven words you can never say on television, but close friends and family members remembered George Carlin as a man who, when he was offstage, had only a kind word for everyone he met. At a private memorial service attended Sunday by 150 people - "That was as small as we could keep it," chuckled Carlin's daughter, Kelly Carlin McCall - her father was memorialized by comedians Bill Maher, Garry Shandling and others as someone who had no enemies, in part because he was nice to everyone he spoke to. "What everyone said tonight is if you spent time with my father, whether it was five seconds or five hours, he was kind, attentive, very connected to you, compassionate," Carlin's daughter said. Shandling, who told of being a teenage college student when he sought out Carlin nearly 40 years ago. "My dad read his material and encouraged him to continue on, which was a life-changing moment in Garry's life," McCall told the Associated Press after the service. Overall, Carlin's daughter said, the service was a happy event, one presided over in part by her father himself, who spoke from a montage of video clips assembled from his 51-year career. Carlin, who died June 22 of heart failure, recorded nearly two dozen albums, 14 HBO comedy specials, wrote three best-selling books and appeared in numerous movies and TV shows. "It was a very, very light event, as he wanted it," McCall said of the two-hour service. "He wanted a lot of laughter. I'd say 90 percent of it was laughing and just remembering what he brought to us in his funny way." Although his standup routines were often filled with four-letter words - so many that early in his career Carlin was sometimes jailed - his dead-on ability to highlight the absurdities of everyday life, and to do so in such comical voices and faces, made his humor come across as anything but harsh. And although famous for four-letter words, Carlin, 71, did not always use them. He was also Mr. Conductor on the children's show "Shining Time Station," Fillmore the hippie van in the 2006 children's movie "Cars," and the guest host of the first "Saturday Night Live" episode ever broadcast. That 1975 show was replayed by NBC on Saturday night in his honor. Speakers at the funeral included Carlin's older brother, Patrick, his partner, Sally Wade, and his former standup partner, Jack Burns. Carlin's wife, Brenda Hosbrook Carlin, died in 1997. Carlin and Burns had met in 1960, and although they worked as a comedy duo only briefly, they remained lifelong friends. In an earlier interview, Burns recalled Carlin calling him several times a year to remind him of such things as the anniversary of the day they met, the day they did their first show together and, in one less-than-joyful incident, the day they were jailed for armed robbery in Texas in a case of mistaken identity. That's just the sentimentalist he was, said McCall, who is Carlin's only child.
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