So how good are you at Rock Band?

“Life is sacred? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death…”

George Carlin dared to question that which we had been told never to question and as a result educated millions on how to view the world we live in without whitewash. It was our utter surprise at how true it all sounded to our ears that made him a comedic genius, a counterculture revolutionary and one of the leading voices of free thought and expression in my lifetime.

I can remember the first time I had heard George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” (yes, that is the real title, not “Seven Dirty Words”). It was summer, it was hot and I’d been playing street hockey all day with the kids who lived across the street. We went inside and one of the older brothers brought out a record they had just bought, a comedy record. It was called “Class Clown” and had a picture of some hippie-looking guy sitting in front of a blackboard, making a face. That hippie, of course, was George Carlin.

I’d had a very suburban upbringing and the only counterculture I’d ever experienced was what I’d seen sensationalized on television. My parents, both being quite liberal, never shielded my eyes from the world but at this point the orbit of my life had never crossed with anyone who had questioned authority with such amazing wit and cleverness. The needle went down on the record right to the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” and within the first 90 seconds, at the point at which he masterfully reveals those seven words in a manner intended to both shock and amuse, I felt myself experiencing a revelation. Sure, I’d heard all those seven words before, used most of them on a daily basis at that point but together, as told by Carlin, they were like a comedy smart bomb exploding in my cerebral cortex. I felt like the monkey touching the big stone monolith in 2001. I went home that night and couldn’t stop thinking how hilariously powerful those words were when used for comedic purposes.

And it wouldn’t be until years later that it would become more clear to me how exposing how these forbidden words as funny was actually something you could apply to everything that we fear, dislike or don’t understand. The demonization of words and thoughts is the basis of bias regardless of what that bias is focused upon and Carlin had a natural gift for peeling away the layers of bullshit to show us how absurd everything we held serious and sacred actually was. He found humor in our infallible ability to never escape what made us human: our fears, our beliefs and the foundations of society like politics and religion. He questioned authority by showing how inconsistent and arbitrary it all seemed to be and that and all the laughter is his greatest legacy and why I will miss him terribly. Today I will mourn his loss and celebrate his life by making sure I own every one of his albums. I will download them off eMusic or buy them from Amazon and I will keep them and hold them dear until the time is right to pass them onto my son so that he too, may grow up with his eyes open to the world, one that I hope he will choose to continue to question no matter what anybody tells him.