Kill Your Idols: Eddie Murphy Delirious

Calin's "Take Offs and Put Ons" album was outstanding. Geez, I listened to that so many times I practically had every bit memorized. His blowup of a news report was amazing, with Al Sleet (the hippy dippy weatherman) and Biff Burns in the Sportlight Spotlight.

 

I've mostly heard the more famous George Carlin recordings, including, yes, his later stuff. He cursed and proselytized. I don't like much political humor.

My problem with getting into Richard Pryor is really one of my age. I didn't really listen to much Pryor until well after I had heard a lot from Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy and Chris Tucker and Patrice O'Neal and all the Def Comedy Jam albums. Pryor's work doesn't seem fresh when you listen to it after all that. I get that he was the principle influence on almost all those guys, though. I'm also not crazy about the fact that so much of Pryor's routines were written by others.

 

Carlin at his best.

 

I'm thinking we'll have to disagree on this and meat. We'll always have TV, though.

Re-listening to this, I think my problem with Carlin is that so much of his material was topical. That inherently means the material won't age well. All these events he's riffing on happened about 20 years before I was born.

 

Yeah, I can understand that. I just think he was so good, so cutting edge in his time and I don't want people thinking the sum of his career is what he was the last 10 years before he died. He was so much better than that.

 

Carlin evolved from a comedian into a social pundit.
His last 10 years were outstanding in that regard. And funny.

 

I just found him angry and pathetic toward the end.

"_____ sucks" isn't vital social commentary, and that was his act for the last year of his life.

 

But he still used humor to drive it. And, yes, we're fucked-up.
Carlin was happy and laid-back off the stage, from what I've heard.

 

So when's the last time Eddie did any standup?

That's what's sort of amazed me about Delirious. The guy who had the single most successful performance in standup history didn't really do much standup. He did Delirous, Raw and ....what else?

 

Agreed. And that's exactly where I figure Versatile was coming from. Carlin always had topical and political stuff, but he also had routines about cats and dogs, sports, travel, euphemisms and needing places to put your stuff that work in any time.

 

Then link me to that stuff. When I think of Carlin, I think of topical jokes, impressions that sound the same and an old man shouting at a cloud.

 

Carlin's social commentary alone puts him in my all-time top 3 of comedians. Yes, much of it was "topical" but I don't see how that's a bad thing. Most of those topics, on censorship or drugs or homelessness or war or organized religion, are still plenty relevant. Give me a world-aware comic with conviction like Carlin over some white-bread schlub mocking his wife and kids. We have enough of those. Yeah, he lost his fastball after his first wife died. But the 30 years of greatness before that are still worth listening to.

Carlin on "stuff":

One of his most famous routines, on baseball vs. football:

He had so many classic routines about language and the way we use it. Here's one on "advertising lingo":

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And another on euphemisms: