its especially annoying when people want to push it on other people in the public square. Its even funnier when jesus specifically said you just need love. Its like they don’t even pay attention to what their savior said.

George Carlin was a comedian who made people laugh by asking them to look again at the things they usually accepted without question: the words they used, the rules they obeyed, the institutions they trusted, and the absurd routines of everyday life. Born George Denis Patrick Carlin in New York City on May 12, 1937, he grew up in Manhattan, raised by his mother after his parents separated when he was very young. His childhood in the city would leave him with a lasting ear for the voices, rhythms, slang, and contradictions of ordinary people. He later described himself as someone who spent much of his time observing and thinking, habits that became essential to his comedy. Before he became a celebrated stand-up, Carlin joined the U.S. Air Force, trained as a radar technician, and worked as a radio disc jockey. In 1959, he met fellow radio announcer Jack Burns, and the two formed a comedy partnership. Burns and Carlin performed together in clubs and on television before splitting in 1962, allowing Carlin to pursue a solo career. His earliest public image was that of a clean-cut, suit-wearing comic: polished, quick, and comfortable on mainstream television. He became a frequent guest on popular programs, including The Tonight Show, and built a reputation with comic characters, impressions, and carefully arranged routines. Yet the performer audiences came to know most vividly was not simply the young entertainer in a tie. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Carlin changed his look, his stage manner, and the subjects he was willing to tackle. He grew his hair and beard, adopted a more relaxed style, and moved toward material that questioned authority and mocked the assumptions of American life. The shift was not just a costume change. It reflected a deeper artistic decision: instead of merely entertaining audiences, he would use comedy to examine the world around them. Carlin’s work could be playful and meticulously constructed, but it was also skeptical, irreverent, and often deliberately uncomfortable. One of his best-known routines, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” turned a list of prohibited words into a broader joke about censorship, hypocrisy, and the power people assign to language. Carlin did not treat the words as mysterious objects; he asked why some sounds were considered intolerable while violence, dishonesty, and other harms could pass more easily through public conversation. The routine became part of a legal dispute after a radio station broadcast it. In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation that the Federal Communications Commission could regulate indecent material on broadcast radio and television under certain circumstances. The case made Carlin’s bit part of a national debate about speech and broadcasting, though the routine’s lasting appeal was never only legal or political. It showcased his central talent: taking an everyday rule, turning it around in language, and revealing how strange it looked from the other side. Language was one of Carlin’s favorite subjects. He listened closely to clichés, euphemisms, jargon, slogans, and official phrases, then exposed the ways they could obscure meaning or make questionable ideas sound respectable. His comedy often depended on exact wording and timing. A small change in a phrase could create a new implication; a list could build into a cascade of jokes; a familiar expression could become ridiculous once he examined it literally. He was not simply a comedian with a sharp tongue but a writer and performer who treated speech as both the instrument and the subject of comedy. His routines were carefully shaped, often delivered at a rapid pace, and filled with escalating examples. The audience had to follow his thought as it unfolded, sometimes recognizing the joke a moment after the words had landed. This precision helped make even his most cynical observations feel crafted rather than casually thrown out. Over time, Carlin’s comedy grew more openly critical of politics, religion, consumerism, mass media, patriotism, and the contradictions of American culture. He mocked the confidence of people who claimed certainty, the machinery of advertising, and the tendency to treat social conventions as natural facts. His criticism could be harsh, and he did not always offer a comforting alternative to the targets he attacked. That was part of his point: he wanted to make audiences notice the mismatch between the language people used to describe society and the way society actually behaved. His worldview could sound bleak, but his jokes were powered by lively curiosity. He was fascinated by how people organized their lives, how institutions protected themselves, and how ordinary habits could become absurd when examined closely. In the later decades of his career, Carlin became known to new generations through HBO specials, films, television, and books. He appeared as Rufus in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its sequel, voiced the American narration for Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, and played Mr. Conductor on Shining Time Station. He also appeared in films including Dogma and The Prince of Tides, showing that his career reached far beyond the stand-up stage. His books, including Brain Droppings, Napalm & Silly Putty, and When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, carried his compressed observations and comic language onto the page. Still, live performance remained central to his identity. He kept writing and touring, revising material as the culture changed and as his own perspective sharpened. His later specials continued to challenge audiences with pointed reflections on power, human behavior, and the stories people tell themselves about progress. Across a career lasting nearly five decades, Carlin received five Grammy Awards and numerous other honors. In 2008, he received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He died on June 22, 2008, in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 71, after a heart failure; his final performance had taken place only a week earlier. His influence can be heard in the work of comedians who combine jokes with social criticism, but his legacy is not simply that he made it acceptable to be provocative. Many performers can shock an audience; Carlin’s distinctive achievement was to make provocation part of a larger act of attention. He urged people to listen to words, question inherited assumptions, and notice the distance between what society claims and what it does. His comedy did not ask audiences to agree with every conclusion. It asked them to look, listen, and think—and then to laugh at the strange, frustrating, often comic world they found.

Number 11: Thou shalt use paragraphs.

Old but still true and funny.‘I have a problem with the Ten Commandments. Here it is: Why are there ten? We don’t need that many. I think the list of commandments was deliberately and artificially inflated to get it up to ten. It’s clearly a padded list. Here’s how it happened: About five thousand years ago, a bunch of reli-gious and political hustlers got together to figure out how they could control people and keep them in line. They knew people were basically stupid and would believe anything they were told, so these guys announced that God— God personally—had given one of them a list of Ten Commandments that he wanted everyone to follow. They claimed the whole thing took place on a mountaintop, when no one else was around. But let me ask you something: When these guys were sittin’ around the tent makin’ all this up, why did they pick ten? Why ten? Why not nine, or eleven? I’ll tell you why. Because ten sounds important. Ten sounds official. They knew if they tried eleven, people wouldn’t take them seriously. People would say, “What’re you kiddin’ me? The Eleven Commandments? Get the fuck outta here!” But ten! Ten sounds important. Ten is the basis for the decimal system; it’s a decade. It’s a psychologically satisfying number: the top ten; the ten most wanted; the ten best-dressed. So deciding on Ten Commandments was clearly a marketing decision. And it’s obviously a bullshit list. In truth, it’s a politic; document, artificially inflated to sell better. I’m going to show you how you can reduce the number of commandments and come up with a list that’s a bit more logical and realistic. We’ll start with the first three, and I’ll use the Roman Catholic version because those are the ones I was fed as a little boy. • I AM THE LORD THY GOD, THOU SHALT NOT HAVE STRANGE GODS BEFORE ME. • THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN. • THOU SHALT KEEP HOLY THE SABBATH. Okay, right off the bat, the first three commandments—pure bullshit “Sabbath day,” “Lord’s name,” “strange gods.” Spooky language. Spooky language designed to scare and control primitive people. In no way does superstitious mumbo jumbo like this apply to the lives of intelligent, civilized human in the twenty-first century. You throw out the first three commandments, am you’re down to seven. •HONOR THY FATHER AND MOTHER. This commandment is about obedience and respect for authority; in other words it’s simply a device for controlling people. The truth is, obedience and respect should not be granted automatically. They should be earned. They should be based on the parents’ performance. Some parents deserve respect. Most of them don’t. Period. We’re down to six. Now, in the interest of logic—something religion has a really hard time with—I’m going to skip around the list a little bit: • THOU SHALT NOT STEAL. • THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS. Stealing and lying. Actually, when you think about it, these two com-mandments cover the same sort of behavior: dishonesty. Stealing and lying. So we don’t need two of them. Instead, we combine these two and call it “Thou shalt not be dishonest.” Suddenly we’re down to five. And as long as we’re combining commandments I have two others that be-long together: • THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY. • THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR’S WIFE. Once again, these two prohibit the same sort of behavior; in this case, mar-ital infidelity. The difference between them is that coveting takes place in the mind. And I don’t think you should outlaw fantasizing about someone else’s wife, otherwise what’s a guy gonna think about when he’s waxing his carrot? But marital fidelity is a good idea, so I suggest we keep the idea and call this commandment “Thou shalt not be unfaithful.” Suddenly we’re down to four. And when you think about it further, honesty and fidelity are actually parts of the same overall value. So, in truth, we could combine the two honesty commandments with the two fidelity commandments, and, using positive lan¬guage instead of negative, call the whole thing “Thou shalt always be honest and faithful.” And now we’re down to three. •THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR’S GOODS. This one is just plain stupid. Coveting your neighbor’s goods is what keeps the economy going: Your neighbor gets a vibrator that plays “O Come All Ye Faithful,” you want to get one, too. Coveting creates jobs. Leave it alone. You throw out coveting and you’re down to two now: the big, combined honesty/fidelity commandment, and the one we haven’t mentioned yet: •THOU SHALT NOT KILL. Murder. The Fifth Commandment. But, if you give it a little thought, you realize that religion has never really had a problem with murder. Not really. More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason. To cite a few examples, just think about Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the Crusades, the Inquisition, our own abortion-doctor killings and, yes, the World Trade Center to see how seriously religious people take Thou Shalt Not Kill. Apparently, to religious folks—especially the truly devout—murder is ne¬gotiable. It just depends on who’s doing the killing and who’s getting killed. And so, with all of this in mind, folks, I offer you my revised list of the Two Commandments: First: •THOU SHALT ALWAYS BE HONEST AND FAITHFUL, ESPECIALLY TO THE PROVIDER OF THY NOOKIE. And second: •THOU SHALT TRY REAL HARD NOT TO KILL ANYONE, UNLESS, OF COURSE, THEY PRAY TO A DIFFERENT INVISIBLE MAN THAN THE ONE YOU PRAY TO. Two is all you need, folks. Moses could have carried them down the hill in his pocket. And if we had a list like that, I wouldn’t mind that brilliant judge in Alabama displaying it prominently in the courthouse wall. As long he in-cluded one additional commandment: •THOU SHALT KEEP THY RELIGION TO THYSELF!

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