Tag Archives: George Carlin

Introducing Tim Minchin

This guy, Tim Minchin, is my new favorite comedian.  If you’ve heard of him, you either agree or disagree with me,  but I’m sure you’ve already made up your mind.  I can’t imagine anybody  saying “eh, he’s all right.” You’re going to either love him, or hate him.

If you’ve never heard of him, check him out.  At first glance, with the weird hair and all, you might think he’s a Russell Brand wannabe but outside of the hair and the eye make-up and the sort of irreverently  radical attitude, they aren’t that much alike.  Can Russell Brand play the piano?  I thought not.

Tim Minchin

Tim Minchin

This link is a tender little lullaby for babies with such sweet, tender lines as “I wish a dingo would come and rip off your fat, bitching head.”

I also quite enjoyed the song called “Kiddie Stuffer,” but if my children were overweight it probably would have pissed me off.  He definitely veered away from comedy into diatribe in an absolute orgy of fat shaming.

I agree with his point.  If your kids have a weight problem, stop feeding them fattening foods and make sure they get some exercise.  But, I can sure see how some people might have been offended.

He’s a bit like George Carlin except that I actually think George Carlin is overrated as a comic.  I like the things he says but he comes across, to me, as an angry young man who went to his grave as an angry old man.  The trick to being a great political comic is 75% comedy, minimum and 25% politics, maximum*.  Even Lewis Black observes that rule.  George Carlin crossed it all the time.  Also, like Russell Brand, George Carlin couldn’t play the piano.

I also enjoyed “Thank God” and “Storm” because they expressed a rational, scientific, non-mystical view of the universe that is shared with Bill Maher and myself, but Minchin is about a million times funnier than Bill Maher with his pissy little “rules.”  I thought he was very mean to the girl known as Storm, though, who was perfectly correct in saying that pharmaceutical companies are evil and science has not yet provided a clear definition of love.

I guess what I’m saying is that I suspect, even though I seriously admire this guy’s talent and share many of his views on society and religion, he might be a real dick to hang out with.  Andy Kaufmann was like that.

*I just made that up.

 

 

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It’s Not as Bad as it Seems

Robert Heinlein once said something like “If you think that things are worse now than ever before in human history, you haven’t read enough history.”

Actually, I think what he said was “If you think death is the worst possible thing that can happen, you haven’t read enough history” but that doesn’t fit the blog I want to write, so I changed his quote.  He’s dead, he won’t object.

My favorite Heinlein story was "The Man Who Sold The Moon."

Really, there are wars all over the world, starvation in Somalia, horrible abuses of women throughout the Islamist nations, economic hard times throughout the developed world and the threat of an actual corporate takeover of the United States, but it’s still nowhere near as evil as the world of 1940.  It’s not as bad as the times of slavery and the brutal war that ended it.  It’s not as bad as the times of the plague, the reign of terror in France, the Spanish Inquisition, the anarchy that followed the collapse of Rome, it’s not as bad as Roman times were for everybody except the Romans.

We not only have a pretty nice standard of living in the developed world, we have electricity, automobiles, airplanes, movies, computers and all sorts of cool stuff.  When I look around me and see how incredibly stupid most people are (I believe it was George Carlin who said “Think of how stupid the average person is, and then remember that 50% of the people are even dumber than that”), I am rather amazed that we’ve gotten as far as we have.

But we have.  And no matter how many ignorant tea baggers continue voting for Republicans, no matter how many completely unnecessary wars get started, people are still working on space elevators, and portable desalination devices, and robots, and alternative energy, and better artificial organs and limbs, and mag-lev trains and flying cars.  Some day, we will have all these things.

We will still have fools among us, no doubt, but life will continue to get better.  If we survive.

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