Eulogy by Uncle Dave:

I saw George Carlin’s show here in Vegas a few years ago. He had clearly slowed down and a lot of his act seemed so down pat that it didn’t feel as intense as those TV concerts I had seen in decades past. But that only meant he had dropped to being better than 95% of the comics out there. His ability to demonstrate how the English language is used and abused and can become magically hilarious from the mouth of a verbal magician such as himself was not diminished.

I grew up in Milwaukee and remember when Carlin was arrested there for uttering the ‘seven dirty words’ in a concert in 1972. My mother, who had walked out of the movie Patton because of the “naughty language,” was glad he was arrested. But given that the Vietnam war was still raging, one of his points afterwards was that many people more interested in words than the bullets that were killing their young men.

Many hated his politics, his style, his intelligence. And many more, like me, loved him for all that. We need someone like him to point out how we are manipulated by words more than ever. And his humor. He will be missed.