The Carlin Cycle
How Bush era comedians and pundits all fall into the same rhetorical trap
When you think about standup comics, the first one you picture is George Carlin. His presence towers above the rest, no one in the standup comedy game even came close; not Louis C.K., not Bill Burr, not Lewis Black, not even the esteemed Dane Cook have the recognition of Carlin. His acerbic style and ho-holds-barred social commentary skewering everything from politicians, the educational system, consumerism and, of course, Christianity earned him a place in the Pantheon of comics that few others ever achieved.
Looking back at his material now it’s surprising how well it translates to the social conventions of 2020s America. Carlin was going off on how big business was working in concert with politicians to present American voters with an “illusion of choice” and the broad scope of wealth disparity decades before rose emoji twitter was a thing. He garnered a reputation throughout the 60s to the 2000s of being an unfiltered truth teller, someone who walked the razor’s edge of acceptable speech and worked to dismantle the preconceived notions surrounding liberal and conservative shibboleths at the time. But I’m not going to parse his appearances on the Smothers Brothers in the 70s. Instead I’m going to focus mostly on the latter decades of his life and career where his disdain for a certain group of un-mellanated people, people who eat unseasoned chicken, people who wear New Balance and go to hot yoga, was ever-present.
George could see the writing on the wall years before the progressive encroachment into academia and corporate culture was realized. He had made his bones doing standup specials on HBO for 30 years and carved out a comfortable niche for himself like so many others of his generation had. And as such he knew the world was becoming more liberal and he also knew the types of people that would be targeted, namely rich old White men such as himself. Of course He didn’t want to be left out in the cold and risk losing a younger more politically engaged audience. He must have known that concepts such as free speech and his critique of political correctness wouldn’t fly with 20 something leftists and didn’t want to spend his twilight years regarded as some fossil whose primary audience was insulated boomers. He knew the safe bet was attacking a target that was traditionally considered to be at the levers of power in America. What’s more, criticizing this target was a safe bet for him and wouldn’t involve having to withstand pushback from liberal media at the time. So he put Whites, specifically White Christians, in his crosshairs and didn’t look back.
Excoriating Whites wasn’t anything new but hadn’t become the de facto manner to address racial inequity when Carlin was still around. Back in the day you ran the risk of alienating your White audience if you implied they were racist without emphasizing that you were joking enough times, people were still trying to coax Whites out of their money by exploiting their guilt in a non-confrontational way. Whites had yet to be conditioned to blithely accept the blood libel levied against them and act like it didn’t sting when someone suggested they were the sole cause behind the deterioration of society. George dove in feet first; during a 1990 Larry King interview he said he felt that Whites felt threatened by the encroachment of black and gay people into traditionally White institutions referencing a comedy bit by Andrew Dice Clay. In a 1997 Dana Gould interview he professed how there were too many Whites in the world and followed it up by stating how great it was going to be when black and brown people started coming to “…get their stuff back…”. In another interview in 2007 he proclaimed that Europe was becoming Islamized and that the White race was on it’s way out in an eerie foretelling of the migrant crisis that would grip Europe in the mid-2010s. Any conservative today that thinks they and Carlin would have shared similar politics is completely deluded. If he were still alive, Carlin would be an insufferable progressive hack doing spots on CNN blubbering about migrants and racism with Don Lemon.
Carlin had the good sense to die near the end of Bush Jr’s second term, it was poetic in a way for he had built his career lambasting warmongering conservative politicians like Bush. When Bush ascended to the White house and kickstarted the GWOT after 9/11, George must have felt like all the effort he put out on stage warning America about evil White men like Dubya was for nothing, similarly to how conservatives feel when their urban outreach programs yield 5% of the black vote. With the Bush administration winding down there was no need for George any more, he had outlived Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, and Sam Kinnison and he had imbued multiple generations with a sense of distrust regarding governmental authority and felt his job was done. But there were other comedians and pundits who styled themselves after Carlin, building personal brands by leading the charge against corporate hegemony and government overreach to wind up at a similar place as Carlin when they too reached middle age. That is to say, scrabbling for relevance in a post-Bush, post-Conservative landscape wherein the grassroots liberal movement they headlined in the 90s and early 2000s became a monolith overshadowing the Baptist preachers, White supremacists, and conservative parents groups they agitated against for so long. The only way to survive was to ape the politics of hip 20 year old progressives. Alexander of Macedonia was said to have wept when he looked across his empire and saw there were no more lands to conquer, so too did liberal comedians.
Of the men to follow in Carlin’s footsteps the one that stands out the most has to be Jon Stewart, the sardonic jewish host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show for 16 years. Before he was on network primetime Jon worked for MTV and gave a thoughtful interview to the man himself on the 40 year anniversary of Carlin’s career. Like Carlin before him, Jon had made a name for himself skewering conventional conservatives and their beliefs and set the stage for other left leaning comedians such as Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert to follow suit. But unlike Carlin, who stood by his beliefs when challenged by conservative pundits, Jon would revert back to insisting his material was to be taken as satire when confronted about his cynicism. It was apparent during his scrap with Tucker Carlson on a 2004 episode of Crossfire that while Jon was quick to demean the show’s format and the host’s proclivity towards spin, he himself couldn’t be considered a serious pundit because the show before his featured puppets making prank phone calls. He pulled the same shtick in an interview with Bill O’Reilly in 2004, from the Wiki article:
Stewart denied the show has any intentional political agenda, saying the goal was "schnicks and giggles" and that "[t]he same weakness that drove me into comedy also informs my show", meaning that he was uncomfortable talking without hearing the audience laugh.
Stewart could take shots at Tucker and “Papa Bear” O’Reilly and incorporate serious political discourse into a comedy show in the early 2000s and get away with saying he had no bias because of the way be branded himself as a sensible, middle of the road lib who sought to have open dialogue with his political adversaries well before that approach fell out of style to be replaced by mentally ill ideologues hurling accusations of fascism at their political rivals.
Like Carlin before him, Stewart could likely sense the sea change that was coming with the onset of Obama who would go on to win the White house in 2008 and he couldn’t fall back on his tried and true brand of championing liberalism in the vein of David vs Goliath in the face of an all-encompassing conservative culture. Certainly not when Obama, the paragon of diversity, had shattered the White, male, and stale notions of the presidency up to that point. When Jon Stewart’s Daily Show run started, it was right before Bush took office and America would have to deal with a near decade of Republican rule where concerned parents would decry Harry Potter books as witchcraft, the military would continue bombing the middle east in the pursuit of freedom and democracy, and traditional ideas of marriage and raising children were still widely accepted. When Stewart’s run ended in 2015, America’s war in Afghanistan looked unending, gay marriage had been legalized, secular progressives had kneecapped Christianity, gamers were trying to reclaim their hobby from women and non-Whites, and the campus culture wars were starting to intensify. Jon wasn’t needed anymore, Bill O’ Reilly and Rush Limbaugh had already been mocked into irrelevance, Hillary was going to be in the White house and liberalism was flourishing. But all this was temporarily upended by the election of Donald Trump of course but at that point Stewart had receded from the limelight and his old foe Tucker Carlson enjoyed a meteoric rise to the throne of cable news punditry. Stewart had left The Daily Show mere months after Trump announced his candidacy for president, but at that point no one thought he’d make it past the debates, let alone the primaries. But in November 2016 Trump was enshrined as the next Hitler and Stewart wasn’t around to comfort us, and his absence was palpable.
Trump lost in 2020 and America, free of the shackles of an overbearing GOP, was yearning for its favorite snarky Jewish lib to return to the air waves to assure us that slavish adherence to liberal dogma was still hip in the 2020s. In September of ‘21 Stewart began a show on Apple TV aptly titled The Problem with Jon Stewart wherein he, like Carlin, took aim at what society deemed to be the sole impetus for all of its ills…Whitey. In this episode of The Problem Jon excoriates Whites for black failure and showcases prominent blacks from Angela Davis and Sista Souljah, to James Baldwin proclaiming that America is a racist country.
Sure you could argue in the days of Jim Crow that the brothers couldn’t get a fair shake, but even back then there was the question of why exactly it was so hard for blacks to make it in a majority White country and why Whites cracked down on them so hard. It’s suggested by many progressive pundits that Whites feel threatened by blacks, but why? Suggesting blacks are more violent than Whites is preposterous, and clutching your purse a little tighter when a black guy walks by is just proof you’re racist. Still, why do people in this country look down on blacks and what is the cause of their problems? It’s not their IQ, the very concept of which is racist psedo-science. It can’t be the welfare state which replaced black fathers with goveurnment handouts for black women, leading to an illegitimacy crisis. It can’t be their culture which glorifies skirting the law and partaking in hard drugs. It can’t be the catastrophic rates of black-on-black violence. It can’t be the failures of public schools many of which get enough government funds to spend upwards of $30K per student in majority black cities. And it certainly can’t be the countless videos of blacks brutally assaulting or robbing White people. Jon and his ilk of left-wing commentators have to answer for this but to employ the logic that Whites just irrationally hate blacks, a thought terminating cliche employed to discourage other Whites from pattern recognition. Like Carlin, Jon knows his audience will turn on him if he ever puts the onus on blacks or any other non-White group, so he sits behind a desk and plays to their egos, reassuring them that none of their problems are actually their fault. Jon is firmly ensconsed in the Carlin Cycle.
Another cultural commentator who made his bones bemoaning conservatives preoccupation with guns during the Bush years was Michael Moore. His 2002 film Bowling for Columbine took aim at the culture Moore believed was responsible for high profile mass shootings, specifically downscale Whites and their damned rifles. Twenty years ago progressives didn’t want to investigate the causes of atomization and disillusionment that propelled White men to act in aggressive and asocial manners, nor do they want to today, it’s far easier to just assume these men are inherently evil and scared of progress and not the byproduct of a culture that constantly belittles them and minimizes their grief. Doing so would mean progressives like Moore would have to be introspective of the role they played in creating such a culture, they might actually have to confront how their rhetoric gave rise to a growing reactionary movement. But no, they’re happy to be insulated and to offer no solutions except telling people to blindly vote for Democrats.
Like Carlin, Moore was well ahead of the curve when it came to spewing anti-White animus in an attempt to shield himself from his audience’s wrath towards rich, White, morbidly obese men like himself. This snippet from the film portrays White pilgrims coming to America, slaughtering the natives, starting the Salem witch trials, starting slavery, inventing repeating guns to they could slaughter natives and slaves more efficiently, and when all the brown people were dead they ran away to the suburbs where they were free to be racist in peace. Progressives like Moore love disseminating content like this, it’s an easy and digestible summation of White history in America delivered with an ironic sheen. It strips out all the historical context, colonial development, and the truths surrounding natives and the Atlantic slave trade because that would cause people to scrutinize Moore’s work and the liberal’s general consensus that history was plagued by the savagery of White men.
Moore, like Stewart, became irrelevant after Bush left office. He reemerged briefly during the run up to the 2016 election to declare that the election of Trump would be the biggest “Fuck You” to the liberal hegemony imaginable, months later he would be proven right and see the liberal project set back years. But besides a few podcast appearances reaffirming his disdain for White folks and how their evil, nasty racism forced us to endure the Trump regime, he’s been largely absent from the political scene. Think about it, when’s the last time you’ve seen his work referenced by any pundit or online progressive? Does anyone post quotes or video clips from Bowling for Columbine or Capitalism: A love story anymore? Does anyone view Moore as anything other than a doughy, stale holdover from when liberalism was a fledgling movement in the face of the Bush regime? Does anyone need another smug, wealthy, Gen X gastropod offering milquetoast critique of the financial systems and largely White audience that helped him earn his wealth in the first place? Stewart at least had a winning personality but Moore comes across as just another resentful lib. If the question is whether he still has even a small percentage of the impact he had at the turn of the millennium, the answer is a resounding “No”. Moore may be largely irrelevant, but he’s still trapped in the Carlin Cycle.
Still, during a 2018 Seth Meyers interview Moore extolls the virtues of democracy and tells old White men to just give up and let women have control of the levers of power in America. Voting is important right? That’s the message influential progressives have been touting for decades even as demographics and a growing number of homosexual Zoomers ensure a super majority in their favor. Sure, a growing number of Americans are disenfranchised with voting after witnessing the shady behavior of vote counters, tabulators, poll takers, and the corporate media during the 2020 election. And many are wondering if casting a ballot for the GOP is even a viable option anymore. But as long as the sacred process of democracy is underway, we can be assured that American values as dictated by lobbyists, journalists, and progressive billionaires are safe.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to blame Whites for the problems of society. Progressives reflexively throw out accusations of White supremacy at everyone who questions any aspect of the liberal regime, this type of discourse is designed to act as a hedge against anyone who questions the illicit behavior of non-Whites and non-straights and discourage anyone from asking whether there’s an ulterior motive to progressive rhetoric and it still works reliably. Blaming Whites is lazy and trite, and a lot of progressives understand that, but no matter how many Whites reliably vote Democrat or would happily sell their own race down the river if it meant a black guy would honor them by fucking their daughter, the fact remains that we are firmly in the crosshairs for reasons beyond our control. Carlin took shots at Whites because it was easier than giving his sacred minority groups agency, and Moore and Stewart and a plethora of other “funny” libs do it today for the exact same reasons. Sure, there are anti-woke comedians whose body of work consists of taking shots at the same obnoxious leftists Sargon of Akkad was skewering back in 2015, but their reach is dwarfed by the Seth Rogans, Louis CKs, Patton Oswalts, and Sarah Silvermans kicking the corpse of the White hegemony for applause.
Fuck George Carlin, fuck the chic ironic nihilism he helped propagate and fuck the standup hacks who got rich ripping off his shtick. Carlin, Stewart, and Moore should have been left in the mid-2000s along with Hoobastank and Britney Spear’s sanity but we still have to have their liberal values pumped into our brains non-stop. Right wingers might be stuck without a popular comedic figure on television echoing their views after Million Dollar Extremes World Peace was cancelled, but at least we have enough integrity not to self-flagellate for acceptance from the members of the progressive stack who would see us wiped off the face of the earth.
Well said. I remember the irreverent and rapid-fire deliveries of George Carlin fondly from my ignorant youth. He was a nihilistic firebrand that reflected the selfsame nihilism I shared.
Now in retrospect, I am completely glad the fucker is dead. He would be using his verbosity to be the most insufferable boomer prick imaginable in our T.V. hellscape. May he rest in hell.