The Universe Is Funny...Like George Carlin

On Sept. 10, 2001, George Carlin [...] recorded a bracing hour of social commentary for his new HBO special. The next day, he shelved it.

[...]

It wasn’t only the title, “I Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die,” that seemed in bad taste after nearly 3,000 people were killed a day later in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Mr. Carlin also told a joke about a fart so potent it blew up an airplane. “You know who gets blamed? Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Carlin joked.

[...]

If timing is everything, Mr. Carlin had nothing.

  NYT

What do you mean? Sounds like his timing was brilliant.

While this can seem like cheap provocation compared with his more famous bits, [...] gleefully imagining mass destruction had been a regular part of his stand-up for years. “I watch television news for one thing only — entertainment,” he said in “Jammin’ in New York,” his 1992 special. “My favorite thing is accidents and fires. I’m not interested in the budget. You show me a hospital on fire and I’m a happy guy.”

What Mr. Carlin is doing here is satirizing American blood lust, bringing to the surface the impulse that makes professional wrestling and crime stories so popular.

Or maybe he really meant it. I used to argue with my brother about whether the world is overpopulated. He said the earth can support a lot more people. My contention was that would be true only if they're all third world people who aren't sucking up all its resources. We first worlders are killing her. And we're killing third worlders while we're at it.

Fifteen years later, his lost special is finally being released. (It is on Sirius XM, though it will be for sale as a download or on CD or vinyl on Sept. 16, at Amazon and iTunes, among other outlets.) [...] It’s a polished hour of new jokes with a virtuosic centerpiece, an intricate and elusive nearly 10-minute story that inspired its title, firmly in the tradition of Mr. Carlin’s comedy but also a fascinating departure.

A quantum performance. Like Schrödinger's cat, I guess. We'll know which it is only when we observe it.  ("New" jokes?  I think you mean, jokes we haven't yet heard.)

What really distinguishes this from Mr. Carlin’s previous work is that it becomes totally unhinged from logic. He was nothing if not a rigorous thinker [...] . But in “I Kinda Like It,” his arguments gradually unravel, deconstruct and are interrupted by supernatural details and then pure nonsense. What begins as satire devolves into madness, culminating in a nightmarish dinner party attended by bitter, resentful zombies, all named Uncle Dave.

That's not logical?

At the end of this parade of catastrophes, these bitter men gather around a table and spew resentments about their children, parents, the government and minorities. Their disgust spins out of them into what Mr. Carlin describes as a swirling “pool of hate” that expands beyond the universe and explodes in a kind of second big bang. The new world that emerges is utopian, and every Uncle Dave wins the lottery every week. Out of disaster comes nirvana.

So, mythological.