Carlin
Just came back from Carlin's show (his second-to-last in Vegas for this run). Has anyone seen him here before? Is he ALWAYS this obscene when in a casino show? I'm not a prude by any measure, and I certainly wasn't offended or anything, but there was NO material that wasn't potty humor. Much of it had no punchline other that the gross darkness of it all, but that gets old fast. By the time he suggested that we dig up young dead women and cut out their genatalia for use as sex toys, I was tired of laughing out of politeness.
His mind is going, too. He kept forgetting things, and the thread of his jokes wound and doubled back in a disturbingly chaotic way. And the most awful, stomach-churning thing of it all is the painfully obvious certainty that Carlin knows this is happening. He stutters, apologizes, and prefaces his jokes with strange, rambling qualifiers. At one point he even noted that he was screwing up the transitions, and at another he offhandedly mentioned that it was weird that he couldn't remember any of his old material, and that it had been happening alot lately. That wasn't part of his joke, just sort of a sad little aside while he frantically tried to think of something else to say.
He blamed it on the venue, calling the place "a curse" and emphasizing how glad he would be to leave it behind and go back to his normal touring schedules. And to top it all off, his opening and closing pieces (neither of which were very funny) he read word-for-word off of paper because, per his own explanation, his material was too hard to memorize on his own, and he needed to perform it for it to stick.
For those who saw his bomb on Leno shortly after his appearance in SLO where he stumbled and ruined most of his jokes, imagine that stretched out over an hour and a half. I used to like Carlin - hell, I still like him - and that made the show that much worse to bear. Pity doesn't make a man more funny.
His mind is going, too. He kept forgetting things, and the thread of his jokes wound and doubled back in a disturbingly chaotic way. And the most awful, stomach-churning thing of it all is the painfully obvious certainty that Carlin knows this is happening. He stutters, apologizes, and prefaces his jokes with strange, rambling qualifiers. At one point he even noted that he was screwing up the transitions, and at another he offhandedly mentioned that it was weird that he couldn't remember any of his old material, and that it had been happening alot lately. That wasn't part of his joke, just sort of a sad little aside while he frantically tried to think of something else to say.
He blamed it on the venue, calling the place "a curse" and emphasizing how glad he would be to leave it behind and go back to his normal touring schedules. And to top it all off, his opening and closing pieces (neither of which were very funny) he read word-for-word off of paper because, per his own explanation, his material was too hard to memorize on his own, and he needed to perform it for it to stick.
For those who saw his bomb on Leno shortly after his appearance in SLO where he stumbled and ruined most of his jokes, imagine that stretched out over an hour and a half. I used to like Carlin - hell, I still like him - and that made the show that much worse to bear. Pity doesn't make a man more funny.
Posted by martin on 3/2/04 at 9:07PM
