Bad boy? Yeah right.

Well, here’s the thing. It’s not 1970s any more, and if you swear a lot on stage or in print, it doesn’t make you a convention-defying transgressing maverick. It means just that: you swear a lot. Don’t get me wrong, one can swear as much as they please for all I know, but the subject matters as well. I’ve watched quite a few of Carlin’s HBO shows and it seems like he grew quite a few sharp teeth lately – for instance, I’ve found his… uhm… critical discourse on religion laugh-out-loudly funny – but the book misses it big time. Some children ain’t gonna make it in life and some look ugly? Duh. Old people drive annoyingly slowly? Yawn. From the title and the preface you’d expect a more politically and socially loaded content – yeah, humanity invented both napalm and silly putty, so shall we dig deeper as to why? Nah. Not bothered, it seems. Instead you get a load of dated tea-and-toilets jokes completely missing the point of being even remotely funny.
Even more annoyingly, a lot of the chapters are a verbatim transcript of the bits from the show, so you’ve heard it all (don’t know, maybe all of them are – I can’t claim I’ve seen every show). Witty and intelligent? Neither, really: you could cut straightforwardness with a knife. Just very, very basic.