Words matter. These are the best Carlin Quotes from famous people such as Steven Wright, W. Kamau Bell, Merle Haggard, Denis Leary, David Bryan, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
George Carlin’s album, ‘Class Clown,’ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.
I want to write the reparations joke that makes people go, ‘Yay! I’m so happy!’ It’s easy to go onstage and just make fun of all the ‘isms’ instead, but we can’t all be Jeff Dunham. Although that pays very well… it pays way better to be Jeff Dunham than it ever paid to be George Carlin or Lenny Bruce.
Well, I’m kinda like George Carlin. I think that there ought to be a time where everybody should have all the drugs they want and there’d be nobody in charge, sort of like… now!
The things that make me angry still make me angry. George Carlin is 67, and he’s still as funny as he’s ever been, and he’s still angry. And that makes me feel good, because I feel like if I stick around long enough, I’ll still be able to work.
When I was growing up, I had more comedy albums than musical ones. George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor – those were my main men.
When I was a young comic just starting out, I was very cautious, as I didn’t want to alienate people. George Carlin’s bravery became a benchmark. I became perfectly fine with alienating some people in the audience. That just comes with the territory.
I’ve always thought George Carlin was brilliant.
When I was a bit older I had all of the George Carlin records, all of the Steve Martin records, all of the Cheech and Chong records and all of the Richard Pryor records.
George Carlin maintained that anything and everything is funny given the right context. This context also includes your own history with a given group. What I can get away with and where I can go is not a problem with my audience because they know me.
I love comedy and I would write things to myself as an exercise in writing. I didn’t do well for years, and I quit. I started to break down why I was afraid and started to look at people I admired, like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Freddie Prinze, George Carlin and all.
I never was obsessed with comedians. When I was a little, little boy, I’d watch, like, George Carlin on ‘Dinah Shore.’
If I can make you laugh and learn, I want to be like George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Sam Kinison and Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle. I want to be of that ilk, I don’t want to just make you laugh, I want to make you think.
When I used to see Rick Moranis do something, to me that was immediately funny. Or George Carlin or Martin Lawrence.
To me, those three are the revolutionaries. Richard Pryor was honest, raw. George Carlin was brilliant. He was also deep, fearless. And Sam Kinison was another one who went deeper and he revolutionized the angle of tackling humor with the whole rock star element of yelling and screaming, which was hilarious.
I did stand-up. I loved George Carlin and Steve Martin.
George Carlin is brilliant with words, and Johnny Winters is very creative. It’s taking something common and drawing out the humor, being clever with words.
You look at Richard Pryor and Robert Klein and George Carlin and Richard Lewis – those guys were so smart, they were the thinking-man stand-ups.
When I was younger, I listened to the greats: Winters, Mel and Carl, Nichols and May, Pryor, Carlin, Klein, Berman and lots of Lenny Bruce albums. But once I started doing fairly well, I didn’t want to hear anybody’s jokes or premises.
One of my greatest inspirations for stand-up was Jonathan Winters. He was a genius. One thing about him, and also Lenny Bruce, is that they were in the tradition of the one-man show. That’s why Richard Pryor was so great, and George Carlin, too. They prowled the stage, they used voices, they were really talents.
You can be funny and say what you mean; these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Some of the best jokes came from people who meant it. See: Pryor, Bruce, Carlin, etc.
I loved George Carlin… I used to sit in front of the TV and watch the HBO comedy specials. I loved those comedy specials.
I really understood a lot more about comedy after listening to Bill Hicks, who died at 32 years old. He’s probably the best comedian who ever lived. Although you can’t say that because of Carlin, Cosby and Pryor.
George Carlin is kind of my template now because George Carlin before was straight laced regular comic and he had short hair, a tie, suit, nightclub guy. Then he said screw it, let his hair grow, just started telling what he thought was the truth. So that’s what I’m trying to do.
And George Carlin was a guy that the more he aged the younger he seemed.
Show me one guy or woman as funny as Rodney Dangerfield or as good as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, or Joan Rivers. There are a lot of good comics out there, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics.
I just liked stand-up comedy so much. I used to memorize Bill Cosby albums and other people’s albums, George Carlin, Flip Wilson.
Every day I think, ‘Gosh, I wish I could be like George Carlin, Bill Maher: I want that edge.’ But every time I start to get that edgy thing, I get kind of mean.
I look to icons like George Carlin, Chris Rock, and Richard Pryor on how to present these concepts of social change and subversiveness to an audience in a way that’s palatable.
George Carlin was great right up to the end of his life. But Richard Pryor was probably the best, most gifted stand-up comedian who will ever live.
I listened to George Carlin when I was a kid and knew every word of his routines.
