June 23, 2008
Comedian George Carlin died yesterday, and while it’s been years since I watched one of his shows, I feel an emptiness. Carlin was, as many have pointed out, a rare genius whose comedy never got stale. His observations of human behavior cut to the quick and made us laugh at ourselves. The Houston Chronicle’s Andrew Dansby pays tribute to Carlin, and his most famous routine “The Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television.” Dansby points out that Carlin’s jokes have cross-generational appeal: “the fact that the routine hasn’t been time-stamped as a period piece speaks to Carlin’s meticulous writing style.”
I started watching Carlin with my father, and I introduced him to my students, although, the latter wasn’t my idea.
My friend George and I were teaching assistants together in 1994. The reader we used with our composition students focused on language, and George discovered that Carlin’s “The Seven Words…” connected perfectly with the lanuage concepts in the text.
Collaborating with George was thrilling. He was the kind of teacher who pushed his students to stretch and grow without them realizing he was doing it. In some ways, George was a real prick in the classroom. He referred to his comp classes as “dictatorships.” Students knew to arrive on time or not at all; George would both lock the door and place a trash can in front of it. A student would only show up late once, and then the spectacle that was created deterred further tardiness. But he also asked his students to call him Mr. C., and he allowed students to swear but only if they did so with clear intent (but they weren’t allowed to swear at each other).
George could take a group of disinterested students and engage them by bringing in unconventional material like the memoirs of gay men. He challenged his students’ ideas about sexuality, gender, race, and class. Carlin was an important part of this curriculum. George always saved Carlin for the end of the semester–one last writing assignment to finish things up. He didn’t care that students in the neighboring classrooms could hear all of the “seven words” through the walls. Imagine their envy as they sat there writing in-class essays on something far less exciting like “Once More to the Lake.”
George made me braver in my teaching, and I started using Carlin in the classroom too. I’ll never forget how, back then, my students and I connected through laughter and through recognition of ourselves in Carlin’s cutting observations.
George has since given up teaching and moved to Cleveland. It’s a little painful that as I’m writing this, I realize that I was probably in some ways a much better teacher 14 years ago when I was younger and less serious and more willing to experiment.
George and George emboldened my classroom, and I miss them both.

