I don’t know if teenage boys still go through a phase where they’re obsessed with comedy albums — my guess would be “not,” since the “album” is an endangered species these days, and stand-up doesn’t appear to be quite the cultural force it used to be — but back in my increasingly far-off youth, it was almost as if every thirteen-year-old male in the country was issued one at the door as he left that infamously awkward, boys-only puberty lecture in seventh grade. You know, the one where red-faced PE coaches mumbled dire warnings about how we were going to start “noticing hair in new places” and we’d need to start showering every day if we wanted girls to like us. Maybe the comedy album was supposed to be a consolation prize for having just been made to feel impossibly icky about our own bodily functions. Here’s a record, kid; go listen to somebody making fun of the stuff you’ll be obsessing over for the next few years.

We all had our favorite comedians in the middle-school crucible of the 1980s. As I recall, my buddy Keith liked the absurdities of Steve Martin, while my neighbor Kurt Stephensen grooved on the earthy ‘n’ crude acts like Richard Pryor and the up-and-coming Eddie Murphy. I liked those guys just fine, but my comedy hero during those harrowing early-teen years was George Carlin.

My introduction to Carlin was almost certainly on television, although I no longer remember the specifics. Probably I caught one of his frequent appearances on the old Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, or maybe it was on an RCA videodisc* recording of the first episode of Saturday Night Live, which Carlin hosted. (He did more than host, really. The format of SNL’s premiere show was very different from what we now think of as the “SNL formula.” It was more like “the George Carlin show” with occasional filler material featuring the then-anonymous Not Ready for Prime-Time Players. It’s included in the first season DVD set, if you’re curious.)

It couldn’t have been very long after that when I talked my parents into buying me my very first — and still my favorite — comedy album, George’s FM & AM. It was his second album, recorded in 1972 and thus filled with a lot of dated references that I didn’t get at the time (for example, I think I actually learned who Ed Sullivan was from Carlin’s impression of him), but I loved it anyway. I played it over and over and over, memorizing entire routines and learning the man’s vocal patterns, characters, and impressions by heart. I can still recite some bits, notably “Shoot,” an examination of our culture’s favorite euphemism for excrement and all its many nuances, and “The Hair Piece,” a joyful celebration of hirsuteness. The album was pretty tame by modern standards, and actually even by the standards of the early ’80s, certainly compared to the Eddie Murphy stuff that Kurt was into, but it was still grown up in a way that’s difficult to define, grown up like Johnny Carson was grown up. It had nothing to do with the swear words; it was more the subject matter, the attitude, the sense that it wasn’t something that was intended for “all audiences.” Listening to it made me feel like I’d stumbled onto something important, something that was as much a part of what was happening to my body as that mysterious “hair in new places.” The album talked of drugs and divorce and, most wondrous of all, sex. I like to think that album helped me figure out some of those mysteries. And it was — still is, in my opinion — really damn funny.

The time frame blurs together, but at some point after getting that album, my parents again proved their utter coolness by taking Kurt and me to actually see George Carlin live in concert. This was around the time he debuted what is probably his most famous routine, “A Place for My Stuff” (see it here), although Kurt and I would really remember that night for — yep, you guessed it — the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” which George supplemented that night with a lengthy list of variants, all cross-referenced, alphabetized, categorized, and printed on one long strip of chain-driven computer paper… that old-school print-out, yards long and piled on the floor by the time he was finished, somehow made the routine all the funnier. My parents were a bit chagrined by that one, especially my mom, who was terrified Kurt and I would start repeating it all over school — which, of course, we did — and cause outraged teachers and parents to call her and question her fitness as a mother, which to my knowledge never happened. But I think in the end they knew as much as Kurt and I did that the topics George covered, even the vulgar ones, were life. They were truth. And George himself came across as gentle and wise, a favorite uncle who pulls you into an affectionate headlock and says, “Boy, let me tell you how it is…”

As with so many of the things I loved during my adolescence, I kind of outgrew George Carlin for a while. I’d occasionally encounter him somewhere out there in the media — I cheered his appearance as the slick time traveler Rufus in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, although I had to explain to the girl I was dating at the time who he was and why it was cool he was in this silly movie — but mostly I just cherished my fond memories of my favorite comic uncle.

Then, a few years ago, I heard he was going to play Salt Lake again. I was practically giddy at the news and immediately bought tickets, the most expensive ones I could afford so we’d be nice and close. The Girlfriend was unfamiliar with him, so I dug out my old LP and played it for her. I recited all those musty old routines I have socked away up in my brain. I told her how intelligent he was, how witty, how important his work had been to me growing up. We went into the concert hall that night with high expectations… and, to my deep surprise and horror, he wasn’t funny. He. Wasn’t. Funny.

What he was, was pissed off. Angry. Ranting. Downright, deliberately offensive.

Anne tried, because she didn’t want to disappoint me, but she didn’t enjoy the show one bit. And I… I was confused. What the hell had happened to my George Carlin, the man who’d given me “Al Sleet, the hippy-dippy weatherman” and “The Icebox Man”? He’d always been quick to point out the stupidities of the human race, but he’d never been mean about it, not that I could remember. In my mind, he’d always been about the little oddities of the English language and playing with words and gently — gently — mocking his fellow man. But this snarling, hateful misanthrope, this cranky old man who was brimming over with pessimism and contempt for everybody and everything… this wasn’t my George Carlin. In truth, I had no idea who that guy was. I didn’t recognize him. And that hurt me in a way that’s difficult to describe without sounding melodramatic and whiny as hell. In the simplest terms, one of my boyhood heroes had let me down by daring to actually change as he aged.

I’m sure everyone has heard the news by now: George Carlin died last night of heart failure, at the age of 71. I’m seeing tributes to him all across the blogosphere. It seems he mattered to just about everyone, and I’m pleased by that. But I’m also rather disheartened to see that nearly everyone is talking about the latter-day George Carlin, the pissed-off Carlin, as if that’s the one that really mattered. And to me, it’s not. A lot of comedians need their anger to be funny, and if they get too content, they lose their edge. (Eddie Murphy, I’m looking at you.) With George, it seems the opposite was true. His anger got in the way of him being funny, in my opinion. It’s the middle-period Carlin I love, the guy in the photo at the top of this entry, not this guy.

I’ve often wondered in the years since that last concert just what happened to George Carlin to change him like that. I’ve felt bad for him, to be honest, because I figure it must’ve been something awful. It’s not that I necessarily disagree with his recent opinions, because I don’t. I think he was right about a great many things, and even right to be angry about them, because I also think this country is going to hell in a bucket and the driving force is materialism and stupidity, just as George railed about. And I don’t think anyone’s ever said anything so wise as Carlin’s remark that a cynic is just a disappointed idealist, because that’s certainly how I tend to think of myself. I’m even willing to accept, as Evanier suggests, that the “hater Carlin” was just a stage persona.

But if that persona truly was anything like the real man, well, then I hope he’s finally found some peace. Because he sorely needed it.

And now, I think I’m going to go find my copy of FM & AM and give it a spin. Just for old times’ sake.

Shoot.

* Videodiscs, not to be confused with pre-DVD laserdiscs, were an early home-video format that worked something like phonograph records. The disc had grooves cut into it that were read by a stylus inside the player, just like an LP record. My parents used to rent them from the local appliance store where my mom occasionally worked, and I owe a big chunk of my early film education to those ridiculously impractical things. (They scratched easily, wore out quickly — especially the rentals that saw a lot of use — and warped if they got too hot, just like records.) If you’re curious about such things, there’s more info on the format here. Not surprisingly, there seems to be a cult following for the format out there on the ‘webs; this site looks like a good resource for just about any aspect of the scene you’d want to explore.