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The Complete CarlinWhat you can learn from watching 800 minutes of George Carlin.

By Joshua David MannPosted Thursday, June 26, 2008, at 1:28 PM ET

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Dana Stevens borrowed a George Carlin joke to illustrate a point about television. David Edelstein reviewed The Aristocrats, a documentary in which 100 comics (including Carlin) tell the same dirty joke. Edelstein also took a close look at Dogma, a film in which anti-religion Carlin plays a New Jersey cardinal. Brendan I. Koerner discussed comedy recording artists and explained how Jeff Foxworthy came to outsell the likes of Carlin, Bill Cosby, and Steve Martin.

All My Stuff offers evidence of Carlin giving similarly withering treatment to lacrosse, New Jersey tollbooths, and the Reagan administration. Yet the institution he challenges with the greatest fervor over the course of these 12 specials is religion. Carlin attended parochial schools, though he says that he was only "Catholic until the age of reason." The early specials don't take on religion directly, yet the heavy burden of his upbringing can still be felt—such blasphemy and bombast could only come from the mind of an altar boy in apostasy. In the later HBO specials, Carlin takes on organized religion directly. In this bit, from 1999's You Are All Diseased, he describes Judeo-Christian theology as "easily the greatest bullshit story ever told":

Religion has actually convinced people that there is an invisible man, living in the sky, who watches everything you do, every minute of every day; and the invisible man has a special list of 10 things he does not want you to do; and if you do any of these 10 things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry, forever and ever, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and HE NEEDS MONEY.

Carlin cites war, disease, hunger, poverty, crime, and the Ice Capades as proof that there is, in fact, no supreme being. Yet one of his favorite ways to lay bare the absurdities of organized religion is to invent his own esoteric systems of belief. In Jammin' in New York, Carlin is a worshipper of something he calls "The Big Electron," a nebulous entity that doesn't punish, reward, or even judge—it just is. By 1999's You Are All Diseased, he is a heliologist, a worshipper of the sun, though he submits his prayers directly to Joe Pesci. In 2005's Life Is Worth Losing, he develops a Revelation-worthy vision of the end of the world. The rant at the end of this performance is perhaps the most impressive of Carlin's diatribe-rich career, not for the sheer power of memorization it required (which is daunting), nor for Carlin's use of the phrase "incendiary cyclonic macrosystem" (which is impossible to imagine coming out of the mouth of another comic), but for its utter bleakness. He describes an apocalypse that is part Stephen King, part Quentin Tarantino, and part George Romero. In the end, the world is consumed in a mighty conflagration. Only hedonistic New York, Carlin's birthplace, is spared.

Despite his lack of faith, Carlin was rather upbeat when it came to the subject of death. "We're all going to do it. It's one of the few fair things in life. Everybody catches it once," he says in George Carlin Again. Death, to Carlin, seemed like a pretty good deal—it brings instant popularity, lots of flowers, and the knowledge of where we actually go in the afterlife. In his final HBO special It's Bad for Ya, which aired in March after All My Stuff had been pressed, Carlin warned that we need to be realistic about the hereafter. He certainly would not want us to think of him smiling down on us from the clouds. If we want to imagine where, precisely, George Carlin has gone, we'd do better to recall what he told us in a line from one of his first HBO specials, back in 1978: "I think when you die your soul goes to a garage in Buffalo."