Quote of the Day (George Carlin, on the ‘Duty of the Comedian’)

"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).