Brain Droppings

by George Carlin

Preface

For a long time, George Carlin’s stand up material has drawn from 3 sources. First the English language: words, phrases, sayings, and the ways we speak. The 2nd source, as with most comedians, has been what he thinks of as the ‘little world’ those things we all experience every day: driving, food, pets, relationships and idle thoughts. The 3rd area is what he calls the ‘big world’: war, politics, race, death, and social issues. 

Without having actually measured, he’d say this book reflects this balance very closely. The first 2 areas will speak for themselves, but concerning the ‘big world’, he’ll say a few things. He’s happy to tell there’s very little in this world he believes in. Listening to the comedians who comment on political, social, and cultural issues, he notices most of their material reflects an underlying belief somehow things were better once and with just a little effort we could set them right again. 

They’re looking for solutions, and rooting for particular results, and he thinks this necessarily limits the tone and substance of what they say. They’re talented and funny people, but they’re nothing more than cheerleaders attached to a specific, wished-for outcome. He doesn’t feel so confined. He frankly doesn’t give a fuck how it all turns out in this country - or anywhere else, for that matter. 

He thinks the human game was up a long time ago (when the high priests and traders took over), and now we’re just playing out the string, and this is, of course, precisely what he finds so amusing: the slow circling of the drain by a once promising species, and the sappy, ever-more-desperate belief in this country there’s actually some sort of ‘American Dream’, which has merely been misplaced. The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if one is emotionally detached from it. He’s always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing he doesn’t belong; it doesn’t include him, and it never has. No matter how one cares to define it, he does not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement, committee; he has no interest in any of it. 

He loves and treasures individuals as he meets them, he loathes and despises the group they identify with and belong to. So, if we’re reading something in this book which sounds like advocacy of a particular political point of view, please reject the notion. His interest in ‘issues’ is merely to point out how badly we’re doing, not to suggest a way we might do better. Don’t confuse him with those who cling to hope. 

He enjoys describing how things are, he has no interest in how they ‘ought to be’, and he certainly has no interest in fixing them. He sincerely believes if we think there’s a solution, we’re part of the problem. His motto: Fuck Hope! 

P.S. Lest we wonder, personally, he’s a joyful individual with a long, happy marriage and a close and loving family. His career has turned out better than he ever dreamed, and it continues to expand. He’s a personal optimist but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. 

He views his species with a combo of wonder and pity, and he roots for its destruction, and please don’t confuse his point of view with cynicism; the real cynics are the ones who tell us everything’s going to be all right. 

P.P.S. By the way, if, by some chance we folks do manage to straighten things out and make everything better, he still doesn’t wish to be included. 

People Who Should Be Phased Out (Longer list in the book)

𝗫 Guys who always harmonize the last few notes of ‘Happy Birthday’ 

𝗫 People over 40 who can’t put on reading glasses without making self-conscious remarks about their advancing age.

𝗫 People who know a lot of prayers by heart.

𝗫 Old people who tell him what the weather used to be where they used to live.

𝗫 People who say, ‘Knock Knock’, when entering room and, ‘beep beep’, when someone is in their path. 

𝗫 Guys who can juggle, but only a little bit.

𝗫 Athletes or coaches who give more than a 100%.

𝗫 Blind people who don’t want any help. 

A Few Things He Likes

𝗫  A guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing and won’t admit it. 

𝗫 A permanently disfigured gun collector.

𝗫 A whole lotta people tap dancing at once.

𝗫 When a big hole opens up in the ground.

Sun of God

He’s begun worshiping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods he could mention, he can see the sun. It’s there for him every day, and the things it brings him are quite apparent at all times: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, he doesn’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry, and interestingly enough, he hasn’t found the prayers he offers to the sun and the prayers he formerly offered to ‘God’ are all answered at about the same 50% rate.

A Name by Any Other Name features all the names long past and has a few more bits I don’t remember, for instance: 

Just think of the Old West. He’s sure if Billy the Kid’s name had been Billy the Schmuck, people wouldn’t have been afraid. ‘Who’s this riding’ into town?’ ‘Billy the Schmuck.’ ‘Oh. Well, fuck ‘im!’ And what about Jack the Ripper? If his name had been Wally, he doesn’t think people would’ve been afraid to walk the streets of London. Not if they thought Wally the Ripper was on the loose. ‘Who’s that? Wally who? Wally the Ripper? Ha-ha-ha-ha! Really? Wally the Ripper, indeed! Ha-ha-ha!’ (Aaron Kosminski, a Polish immigrant and Barber, Sweeney Todding in reality) And he’s sure history wouldn’t be the same if certain names had been slightly different. 

For example, WWII would’ve ended much more quickly if we’d been fighting a guy named Skip Hitler. Suppose there’d been a really outstanding 18th century composer who was better than Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart combined, but his name was Joey the Cocksucker. Do you think he’d be famous today? ‘And now, Eugene Ormandy conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra as they perform the Requiem Mass in C-sharp Minor, composed by Joey the Cocksucker’.

In HI, he once had the pleasure of meeting Don Ho and his lovely wife, Heidi. Plus his 3 brothers, Gung, Land, and Hy.

He’s noticed there are a lot of people named Rice, but no one seems to be named Corn. Just to put a button on this topic: It’s said Indians were sometimes named for the first thing they saw when they were born. Makes you wonder why there aren’t more Indians named Hairy Pussy, doesn’t it?

A Place for Your Stuff is covered, everyone needing a bunch of stuff, and when it’s other people’s it’s shit. (Since it’s in GC’s act and it’s lengthy, we’ll continue on.)

Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z is a bit on how strange sleep is. ‘A bizarre activity. If you didn’t know what sleep was, and only saw it in a sci-fi movie, you’d think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you’d seen.’ (Very edited covering of this topic) So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you’re in a sci-fi movie and whisper, ‘the creature’s regenerating itself.’

A controversial bit on farmers follows, titled, Fuck the Farmers. (Only providing the title)

Erin Go Fuck Yourself

Being Irish, he guesses he should resent the Notre Dame nickname, ‘The Fighting Irish’. After all, how long do you think nicknames like ‘The Bargaining Jews’ or ‘The Murdering Italians’ would last? Only the ironic Irish could be so naively honest. He gets the feeling Notre Dame came real close to naming itself ‘The Fuckin’ Drunken, Thick-skulled, Brawling, Short-dicked Irish’.

Sports Roundup has a lot of gems, one even mentioning the scenario Dave Chappell went through with the fan rushing the stage with a knife looking like a gun.

Carlin compares somebody getting stabbed in sports and we’d be lucky if it spread all through sports, and show business. Like stabbing a famous singer or especially a really shitty pop singer, maybe they’ll even start stabbing comedians. Fuck it, he’s ready. He never performs without his can of mace. He has a switchblade knife, too. He’ll cut your eye out and go right on telling jokes.

Athletes like this physical shit.When they’re pleased with each other they bump chests, and bang forearms. Why don’t they just punch each other in the fuckin’ teeth? Wouldn’t that be great? Teammates, he means. After a touchdown pass, why doesn’t the guy who caught the ball just go over and kick the quarterback right in the nuts? Same with a slam dunk in basketball. The guy who scores oughta grab a chair and beat the living shit out of the guy who fed him the ball. For about 45 minutes.

Fuck you, I Like These Kinds of Jokes!

Anticlimax: What my uncle was good at.

Seersucker: A person who blows clairvoyants.

Douche: A female duke.

Octopus: An 8-sided vagina.

Woodpecker: A 17th-century prosthetic device.

Short Takes (Part 1)

There are 2 pips in a beaut, 4 beauts in a lulu, 8 lulus in a doozy, and 16 doozies in a humdinger. No one knows how many humdingers there are in a lollapalooza.

It is a sad thing to see an Indian wearing a cowboy hat.

You show him the people who control the money, the land, and the weapons, and he’ll show you the people in charge.

We’re all amateurs; it’s just some of us are more professional about it than others.

He thinks we should attack Russian now. They’d never expect it. (copyright 1997)

He has as much authority as the Pope, he just doesn’t have a many people who believe it.

He recently went to a new doctor and noticed he was located in something called the Professional Building. He felt better right away.

Just think, right now as you read this, some guy somewhere is gettin’ ready to hang himself.

There ought to be at least one round state.

Slap a dead person.

Eventually, nature will produce a species which can play piano better than we can.

There are no times which don’t have moments like these.

We’re not satisfied with forcing Russia to destroy its nuclear weapons and recant its ideology. Now we’re really going to get even: we’re sending experts to show them how to run their economy. Is he missing something? A country with a 5 trillion dollar debt is giving advice on handling money?

You know why he stopped eating processed foods? He started to picture the people who might be processing them.

Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground.

If he only had one tooth, he thinks he’d brush it a real long time.

If we could just find out who’s in charge. We could kill him.

It is impossible to dry one hand.

The word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.

Things You Never Hear: ‘Please stop sucking my dick or I’ll call the police.’

Regarding smoking in public: Suppose you were eating in a restaurant, and every 2 minutes the guy at the next table threw some anthrax germs in the air. Wouldn’t you want to sit in a different section?

The idea of a walk0in closet sounds frightening. If he’s ever sittin’ at home and a closet walks in, he’s gettin’ outta there.

‘No comment’ is a comment.

Nothing rhymes with nostril.

Shouldn’t a compliment beverage tell you what a fine person you are?

They said some guy arrested for murder in Las Vegas had ‘a history of questionable actions’. Can you imagine if we were all held to this standard?

When you sneeze, all the numbers in your head go up by one.

Sometimes he looks out the airplane window at a large city at night and wonder how many people are fucking.

Why don’t they have rye pancakes? Grapefruit cookies? Fig ice cream? Cantaloupe pie?

He hopes they do clone the dinosaurs, and they come back just in time for the ozone layer to disappear and wipe those ugly motherfuckers out again.

He thinks we’ve outgrown the word gripe. When everyone has automatic weapons, a word like gripe is sort of irrelevant.

The safest place to be during an earthquake would be in a stationary store.

When he was a kid he used to think it was all the same clouds which kept coming by.

Human beings are kind of interesting from birth until they reach the age of a year and a half. Then they’re boring until they reach 50. By this time they’re either completely defeated and fucked up, which makes them interesting again, or they’ve learned how to beat the game, and this makes them interesting, too.

As grown ups, we never get to ‘wave bye-bye’. He thinks it’d be fun. ‘Steve, the boss is sailing for Europe; we’re all going down to the dock to wave bye-bye’.

There are only 2 paces in the world: over here and over there.

He likes it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It’s so fuckin’ heroic.

When you visualize the recent past, do you see it as being somewhere over on the left?

A sure way to cure hiccups is to jam your fist down the affected person’s throat and quickly open and close your hand several times. It relaxes the Vega nerve.

Regarding Mt. Rushmore: The Black Hills are sacred Indian ground. Imagine the creepy feeling of 4 leering European faces staring at your ancestors for eternity.

Anything But The Present (much longer)

You know, if a guy were paranoid, he might not be blamed for thinking the people who run things don’t want you dwelling too much on the present. Because, keep in mind, the news media aren’t independent; they’re a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class - the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it’ll be slanted to suit them, and then barely followed up. Enjoy your snooze.

If I Were In Charge of The Networks

Goes over teaching broadcasters and hosts how to use certain words and phrases properly.

The phrase sour grapes doesn’t refer to jealousy or envy. Nor is it related to being a sore loser. It deals with rationalization of failure to attain a desired end. In the original fable by Aesop, ‘The Fox and the Grapes’, when the fox realizes he can’t leap high enough to reach the grapes, he rationalizes even if he’d gotten them, they’d probably have been sour anyway.

Rationalization. This is all sour grapes means. It doesn’t deal with jealousy or sore losing. Yeah, he knows, you say, ‘Well, many people are using it this way, so the meaning is changing’ and he says, ‘Well many people are really fuckin’ stupid, too, shall we just adopt all their standards?’

Strictly speaking, celibate doesn’t mean not having sex, it means not being married. The practice of refraining from sex is called chastity or sexual abstinence. And speaking of sex, the Immaculate Conception doesn’t mean Jesus was conceived in the absence of sex. It means Mary was conceived without Original Sin. This is all it has ever meant, and according to the tabloids, Mary’s apparently the one one who can make such a claim. The Jesus thing is called a virgin birth.

Short Takes (part 2)

Infant crib death is caused by grandparents’ breath.

What year did Jesus think it was?

Life is a Near-Death experience.

Never tell a Spanish maid you want everything to be spic-and-span.

This year is the 2-millionth anniversary of sperm.

Don’t you get tired of these cereal commercials where they show the milk being poured in slow motion, and it splashes off a raspberry?

A laugh is a smile with a hole in it.

If a really stupid person becomes senile, how can you tell?

You know you’re getting old when you begin to leave the same smell in the bathroom your parents did.

There was no Big Bang. There was just a Big Hand Job.

He can’t wait until we get a really evil president. Not devious and cunning like Nixon and Johnson. But really, really evil. God, it would be so refreshing!

School Days

It turned out he was pretty good in science, but again, because of the small budget, in science class we couldn’t afford to do experiments in order to prove theories. We just believed everything. Actually, he thinks this class was called Religion. Religion was always an easy class. All you had to do was suspend the logic and reasoning you were being taught in all the other classes.

George Carlin is definitely worth the read, some of the topics are outdated, but a lot of it’s still relevant. If I come across other books of his I’d consider a gander and what a surprise seeing the N-bombs a couple times.