Word: stand-up
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Carlin took stand-up comedy to a new audience and helped redefine it as an art form. In the '70s he sold out concerts, released best-selling albums, starred in HBO specials. Then, after rebounding from drug problems, he reinvented himself a couple more times. In the '80s he re-emerged as a kind of curmudgeonly uncle, with small-bore observational humor and an aphoristic style. In the '90s he tacked back to harder-edged political material, complaining about everything from the environmental movement to the middle-class obsession with golf. Even in his late 60s, Carlin was as sharp...
Carlin started doing stand-up comedy in the early '60s and had fashioned a successful career by the middle of the decade: a short-haired performer with skinny ties, well known to TV audiences for his sharp parodies of commercials and fast-talking DJs and a "hippy dippy weatherman." But as he watched the protest marches of the late '60s and absorbed the new spirit of the counterculture, Carlin decided that he was talking to the wrong audience, that he needed to change his act and his whole attitude...
...early '70s Carlin had completed a remarkable change, opened up a new audience for stand-up comedy and helped redefine an art form. Like Lenny Bruce - whom he idolized and who helped him get his first agent - Carlin saw the stand-up comic as a social commentator, rebel and truth teller. He challenged conventional wisdom and tweaked the hypocrisies of middle-class America. He made fun of society's outrage over drugs, for example, pointing out that the "drug problem" extended to middle-class America as well, from coffee freaks at the office to housewives hooked on diet pills...
...Carlin's career, and his comedy, was anything but a downer. He was unique among stand-ups of his era in remaining a top-drawing comedian for more than 40 years, with virtually no help from movies or TV sitcoms. His influence can be seen everywhere from the political rants of Lewis Black to the observational comedy of Jerry Seinfeld. He showed that nothing - not the most sensitive social issues or the most trivial annoyances of everyday life - was off-limits for smart comedy. And he helped bring stand-up comedy to the very center of American culture...
Richard Zoglin's book Comedy on the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America was published earlier this year by Bloomsbury...