Reply To: George Carlin
He cemented his reputation in the 1970s and spent most of the last thirty years being a sort of elder statesman. I think the edgy brand of comedy that made him famous wasn’t quite so effective once he started getting a bit older; a balding, gray-haired man just doesn’t make such an effective rebel. His linguistic observations, recognizing some of the inherent absurdity of the language and pointing it out for comic effect (the classic example being the question of why we park on driveways and drive on parkways), continued to work as he got older. In fairness, his raunchy humor was mostly a blue variant of his observations on the absurdity of the English language. I’ll always remember him chiefly as someone who looked inside the language, pointed, and laughed, and once we all saw what he was pointing at, we laughed too.