George Carlin
Doin’ It Again
Stand-Up Comedy DVD
MPI Home Video
60 minutes
Winner of the 1990 Cable Ace Award and one of his last great stand-up performances before he became an angry old fart, George Carlin Doin’ It Again was this comic’s 7th HBO performance. It is in this show filmed in New Jersey that you get a taste of what was great standup humour and what was soon to be simple rantings of an angry old man.
This stand-up comedy DVD opens with a bit about offensive language and closes with one of Carlin’s classic pieces on euphemisms. The words he finds offensive are those used at the time such as interface, share, and tres-something.
His discussion of euphemisms, of how we went from “shell shock” to “post-traumatic stress disorder” in little more than seventy years and how the CIA no longer kills people but depopulates the area, makes this bit on Doin’ It Again required viewing for any political science, journalism, and English major.
Carlin is not always absolutely brilliant on Doin’ It Again but even lesser pieces such as Life’s Little Moments, I Love My Dog (with an update on Tippy), and Things You Never See, Things You Never Hear, and Things You Don’t Want To Hear are still funny if sometimes the jokes are a little facile.
However, Doin’ It Again announces the kind of humor that George Carlin would soon rely on. It is in this performance that you notice how he uses swear words more often as a crutch and much less often as punctuation.
The disastrous Rape Can Be Funny will definitely make you squirm, not because of the subject matter but because this great comic doesn’t manage to carry it off.
Still this stand-up comedy DVD is, overall, a very solid live in concert performance by a great stand-up comedian to whom many other comics and performances are still compared to.
It would be fitting, by the way, that when Carlin passes away, or has a terminal experience at the hospital, or is victim of a negative patient care outcome, that the news reports play the last skit on this DVD.
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