12 times George Carlin had it exactly right

George Carlin had a special ability to turn everyday nonsense into something that was as real as it was hilarious.

The softer version of reality

Carlin once said, ‘I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality,’ and you don’t have to look very far to see what he meant.

Companies claim they don’t fire people, they ‘restructure’ them instead. Governments don’t necessarily kill civilians, but there’s ‘collateral damage.’

So many people are obsessed with using cleaner phrases to hide the truth behind ugly things. But Carlin refused to have any of that. He was right.

Doing enough to stay

Carlin had some things to say about workers, too. Namely, ‘Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.’ We all know someone like that, and you might be one of those people. 

Plenty of jobs run on exactly that agreement between workers and employers. The employee does what’s required and gets their paychecks. Nobody gets too excited about any of it because it’s just the way the world works. 

Confidence without the map

You’ve probably seen it before. Someone confidently explains something that they clearly don’t understand, but they continue acting like they do. Carlin saw it, too, and he once said, ‘Most people don’t know what they’re doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.’

It’s a conclusion that even psychologists support. Yes, one study found that people who performed poorly on certain tasks usually rated their own ability way higher than it really was. Being wrong isn’t a problem, but being completely sure while we’re wrong certainly is.

The vanishing present

Time is a tricky one. Carlin made things a little simpler by saying, ‘There’s no ‘now’. Everything is the near future or the recent past.’ It might sound philosophical, yes, but there’s something so practical about it.

Your brain doesn’t interpret events immediately. No, even with small things, your brain takes a tiny bit of time to process what you see, hear, and feel. There’s no such thing as the ‘present’ because your brain is always a little delayed, even by the tiniest fraction of a second.

A reassuring funeral detail

Carlin was the kind of guy who could always find humor in the darkest of moments. Take his line, ‘I’m always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I’m listening to it,’ for example.

He’s reminding us that, while it’s sad to hear a eulogy, you should always be happy that it’s not about you. You’re still alive. It might be morbid, sure, but being able to hear one is actually kind of encouraging, in a very twisted way.

Running out of room

It’s a fact, a lot of us spend too much money. Carlin knew that too. He once said, ‘That’s all your house is. It’s a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.’ He recognized the consumer cycle that a lot of us fall into, and he was ready to call it out.

You buy things, and you need somewhere to put them. Your cupboards fill up, so your garage ends up getting crowded, and you’re forced to pay for storage to hold what won’t fit. We literally built extra buildings for the overflow because we’re so shopping-obsessed.

Going around again

Carlin once wrote, ‘One thing leads to another.’ But then he followed it up by also writing, ‘Not always. Sometimes one thing leads to the same thing. Ask an addict.’ He was the kind of guy who was willing to challenge old sayings like this.

He’s not wrong, really, because addiction does tend to involve repetition. Use, stop, return, stop again, and sometimes repeat, until things are over. One thing really can lead right back to the same thing. Carlin was really right there.

Words change with the room

Carlin was a firm believer that words themselves aren’t a problem. No, for him, it’s the speaker that’s an issue. He said, ‘There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions,’ because he believed a word itself didn’t have some magical amount of evil inside it. 

He believed that context does a lot of the work, and that sort of attitude becomes obvious when you think about it. The same word can sound affectionate among friends but vicious during an argument. It might be completely ordinary somewhere else.

Earth has been through worse

Carlin also cared a lot about the environment, and his perspective on it was kind of refreshing. He once said, ‘The planet isn’t going anywhere. We are.’ What a way to really flip the idea of global warming around.

Earth has already survived asteroid impacts and mass extinctions. These events might’ve wiped out huge numbers of species, but the planet survived it all, and it’ll continue to survive. We’ll be the ones who suffer the consequences of climate change, not Earth.

The joke hidden in the average

The math police might want to avoid this one. Carlin said, ‘Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that.’

Technically, an average doesn’t always divide a group neatly in half, so it’s not right on a mathematical level.

But on every other level, he’s absolutely right. Everyone’s met someone who seems stupider than logically possible. There’s a chance that we might even be that person sometimes, too.

Buying first, paying later

Carlin was great at predicting the future. He said, ‘Advertising sells you things you don’t need and can’t afford,’ and that’s a pretty good description of the internet before it was even a thing. You see something enough times, and you believe it.

Those shoes you weren’t thinking about are now following you around online. It’s kind of annoying. But Carlin’s line is a great reminder of that fact, and a lot of us do well to remember that.

Everybody gets on their feet

Carlin had a problem with standing ovations. He said, ‘Standing ovations have become far too commonplace,’ and really, he had a point. When everybody stands after everything, it means you have nothing to do when something is genuinely extraordinary.

You can’t exactly stand harder, after all. The audience rises these days for concerts and speeches that are simply fine. Even the Los Angeles Times complained about how common standing ovations were, although Carlin made the original complaint years ago.

Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.