There’s a new documentary on HBO about George Carlin, the pioneering and highly influential stand-up, who in the ‘70s helped usher in a new and more profane style of comedy. He’s been talked about recently for other reasons, too. When it was revealed the right-leaning Supreme Court were on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade, many shared his opening salvo from 1996’s Back in Town, in which he tears into Republicans’ inconsistent and illogical hatred of abortion rights.
Nevertheless, Carlin has often been championed by those on the far right as one of their own (at least when he absolutely wasn’t). His comedy, they argue, was about freedom of speech, mistrust of authority, even against environmentalism. (Though to be fair, his lengthy bit on the latter is really about how the planet is trying to get rid of pesky humankind, not that we aren’t making it unfit for the species’ survival.) There’s one person who isn’t buying that: his own daughter.
Kelly Carlin, one of the executive producers of George Carlin’s American Dream, recently went on the podcast The New Abnormal.
“Before he died in 2008, and Hillary was running, my dad was like, ‘You know, it’ll be good. Hillary [Clinton] will get in there and she’ll get some people some jobs.’ I mean, of course he leaned that direction. My dad was a lifelong New Yorker and lifelong New Yorkers hate Donald Trump,” Carlin said. “It just always shocks me when these Trumpers wanna claim him.”
She also laid into the way today’s GOP loves to paint themselves as victims, even trying to popularize white supremacist conspiracy theories about a “great replacement.” “The far right would like to say that they’re the minority now, but [George Carlin] would roll his eyes, because we know where all the wealth and the power is,” she explained. “That was the core, the deepest, deepest core of my father’s moral center from day one of his life.”
Anyway, sorry, Republicans who think George Carlin is speaking to them, even in death. He ain’t.
(Via The Daily Beast)