"I think it's the duty of the comedian to find
out where the line is drawn, and cross it deliberately."—George Carlin,
quoted in Paul Farhi, “Appreciation: One Comic, Twice the Laughs,” The Washington
Post, June 24, 2008
That he did, with routines such as “The Seven Words
You Can Never Say on TV." That anti-establishment stance made him a
counterculture hero. George Carlin, born on this date 75 years ago (“God winces,” he noted in a
timeline on his Web site), pushed back the bounds of what was deemed
permissible a couple of generations ago. But he never forgot about another
“duty of the comedian”: to remind us of the absurdities of quotidian existence,
such as the use of terms like “raw sewage” ("Do some people cook the
stuff?" he wondered).
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