Doug Draper

"It just seems to me that only a nation of unenlightened half-wits could have taken this beautiful continent and turned it into what it is today - a shopping mall." - from George Carlin's 2004 HBO show 'Life is Worth Losing'

My love for the guy goes back to the '60s, when he was still doing his "hippy dippy weatherman" routine on such wholesome television shows as Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin.

As the doped-up weatherman Al Sleet, George Carlin (wearing short hair and a suit at the time) informed us that the overnight forecast called for "dark, continued mostly dark tonight, turning to widely scattered light in the morning," and that ultimately "the weather will continue to change, on and off, for a long, long time."

I'll leave it to you to decide how much more useful weather forecasts are today. The only thing that can be said for sure is that the guy who wrote and delivered those lines did not have a long, long time.

George Carlin, who used humour and words more masterfully than anyone else to pierce through religious and political hypocrisy, and the madness of our modern-day culture, died in a California hospital a week ago last Sunday at age 71 from heart failure.

Or maybe I should say he expired.

Carlin often discussed the way we employ euphemisms like "expired" and "passed away" to blunt the reality of death and other things that make what he blew off as a weak, self-absorbed generation of baby boomers uncomfortable. So to borrow from the detached language he said a hospital or health insurance agent might use, let's just say he experienced a "terminal episode" or a "negative patient-care outcome."

Whatever language suits you, there is no getting away from the fact that one of the most brilliant humourists and social commentators since Mark Twain is gone, and I'm just glad my wife and I took our daughter Sarah to see him before he (to use another euphemism) "left the building."

That building was Shea's Theatre in Buffalo where we quickly discovered, as we surveyed the sold-out audience from our balcony seats, that Sarah (then 14) was the youngest one there.

"Did you take your daughter to see that guy with the potty mouth?" a few people asked me later. "Isn't he the one who made jokes about those seven words you can't say on television?"

Yes, I confessed. But Carlin's insights have almost always filtered in to the discussions in our home about the crazy world around us and we have enough confidence in Sarah to know that (unless she was repeatedly provoked by some schmuck out there) she'd never use those salty words, just as Carlin knew enough not to use them during any of his record number of appearances on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show.

You still can't use those seven words on television even though, as Carlin always maintained, bad words, in and of themselves, are not the real problem. Bad thoughts and actions are quite a different story and, yet, you can find them on the tube almost every minute of the day with hardly a word of protest from people who get their knickers in a knot over words.

Just a few seconds of a Paris Hilton, or Britney Spears is infinitely more damaging to our children's minds than any of the words Carlin ever used.

A teacher I once knew told me he thought Carlin's critiques were "too angry." This came from someone who also told me, as if it were a badge of honour, that he wasn't sure who our prime minister was at the time. All I could think of was how thankful I was my daughter was not in his class and how better off his students would be if he were fired and they could watch Carlin's HBO shows instead.

Carlin never appeared to be angry in any clinical sense of the word. It was more like a healthy outrage as in the old saying, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."

Unfortunately, my daughter has taken up her dad's habit of putting her thoughts on paper. So following news of Carlin's death she wrote that "behind the curse words (was) an insightful, perceptive, intelligent and highly aware individual with absolutely no inhibitions over telling you what he felt was wrong with society."

Carlin recently learned he was to receive his nation's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at a special event in Washington, D.C. Twain once said, "You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."

Carlin's imagination was never out of focus and we are all poorer off for losing it.

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Doug Draper can be reached at ddraper@niagarathisweek.com.