Authors: George Carlin
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Political, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Topic, #Biography & Autobiography, #Essays, #American wit and humor
ial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes
-r ;,, in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.
,;f;r In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! “I
hope I’ll be safe at home!”
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Being Irish, I guess I should resent the Notre Dame nickname, “The Fighting Irish.” After all, how long do you think nicknames like “The Bargaining Jews” or “The Murdering Italians” would last? Only the ironic Irish could be so naively honest. I get the feeling that Notre Dame came real close to naming itself “The Fuckin’ Drunken, Thick-skulled, Brawling, Short-dicked Irish.”
Here’s something I don’t care about: athlete’s families. This is really the bottom of the sports barrel. I’m watchin’ a ball-game, and just because some athlete’s wife is in the stands, someone thinks they have to put her picture on the screen. And I miss a double steal! Same with a ballplayer’s father. Goddamn! “There’s his dad, who taught him how to throw the changeup when he was two years old.” Fuck him, the sick bastard! His own sports dreams probably crash-landed, so he forced a bunch of shit on his kid, and now the kid’s a neurotic athlete. Fuck these athletes’ relatives. If they wanna be on TV, let ‘em get their own goddamn shows. Let ‘em go to cable access.
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I also don’t care if an athlete’s wife had a baby, how she is, how the baby is, how much the baby weighs or what the fuckin’ baby’s name is. It’s got nothin’ to do with sports. Leave it out!
GEORGE CARLIN
brain droppings
And I’m tired of athletes whose children are sick. Healthy men with sick children; how banal. The kid’s sick? Talk it over privately. Don’t spread it all over television. Have some dignity. And play fuckin’ ball!!
Nor do I wanna know about some athlete’s crippled little brother or his hemophiliac big sister. The Olympics specialize in this kind of mawkish bullshit. Either his aunt has the clap, or his kid has a forty-pound mole, or his high school buddy overdosed on burritos, etc. Can’t sports exist on television without all this embarrassing, maudlin, super-sentimental, tear-jerking bullshit? Keep your personal disasters to yourself, and get in there and score some fuckin’ points!
And I don’t care for all that middlebrow philosophical bullshit you get from athletes and coaches when someone on the team has a serious illness or dies in an accident. They give you that stuff, “When something like this happens, you realize what’s really important. It’s only a game.” Bullshit! If it’s only a game, get the fuck out of the business. You know what’s important? The score. Who won. I can get plenty of sad tales somewhere else in this victim-packed society. Fuck all that dewy-eyed sentimental bullshit about people who are sick. And that includes any athlete whose father died a week before the game who says, “This one’s for Pop.” American bathos. Keep it to yourself. Play ball!
And I shouldn’t even have to mention severly injured athletes who are playing on “nothing but heart.” Fuck you! Suck it up and get out there, motherfucker.
And they’re always tellin’ ya that one of these athletes has a tumor. Don’t they know that no one gives a fuck? You know when you care about a tumor? When you have it! Or someone
close to you. Who cares about an athlete? No one cares if a rock star gets a tumor. What’s so special about an athlete? By the way, you ever notice you don’t hear as much about rock stars getting these tumors as you do about athletes? Maybe the drug life is a little better for us than all that stupid sweaty shit the athletes put themselves through. Just speculating.
And I don’t wanna know about sports teams that sew the i initials of dead people on their jerseys for one whole season as if it really means something. Leave that mawkish bullshit in the locker room. I don’t wanna know who’s in mourning. Play ball, you fuckin’ grotesque overdeveloped nitwits!
And you can skip tellin’ me about the Chevrolet player of the game. A thousand-dollar contribution to a scholarship fund in the athlete’s name. Shit. A thousand dollars won’t even keep a kid in decent drugs for one semester. Fuck Chevrolet.
And when are they gonna discover that no one cares if an athlete is active in local charities? People don’t want to know about some coke-headed, steroid monstrosity who’s working to help the National Douche Bag Foundation. Or how much he cares about inner-city kids. Can the cocksuck-er play ball? Fine. Then suit him up and get him the fuck out there on the field and let him injure someone.
One last thing on this topic. No one, repeat, no one is inter
ested in athletes who can sing or play musical instruments. We
already have people to perform these tasks. They’re called
singers and musicians, and, at last count, it would seem we
have quite enough of them. The fact that someone with an IQ
triple his age has mastered a few simple chords is unimportant
and of monumental disinterest. Play ball! ,,
GEORGE CARLIN
PASSTHEROLES
I’m surprised that all this shit about role models has persisted a* long as it has. Why should a kid need a role model? You know what you tell a kid? “Get the fuck out there, get a job, and make a contri-. button.” Never mind that role model shit. If this country is dependent on things like role models, we’re much worse off than I thought.
People say athletes should be role models. I never looked up to ai^ athlete, did you? I liked them. I didn’t copy them. Did you ever listen to one of those guys talk? Would you want your kid to turn out like that? Willing to completely subordinate his ego and individuality for the sake of a group whose sole purpose is to compete with oth&r groups? Can’t have a mustache? Gotta wear a suit jacket? Shit! kid needs a role model and you ain’t it, you’re both fucked.
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I like sports because I enjoy knowing that many of the&e macho athletes have to vomit before a big game. Any guy who would take a job where you gotta puke first is my kinda guy.
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I read that Monica Seles got stabbed. And although I have nothing against Monica Seles, I’m glad somebody in sports gjot stabbed. I like the idea of it; it’s good entertainment. If we”re lucky, it’ll spread all through sports. And show business, to>o! Wouldn’t you like to see a guy jump up on stage and stab soitne famous singer? Especially a real shitty pop singer? Mayrbe they’ll even start stabbing comedians. Fuck it, I’m ready! I never perform without my can of mace. I have a switchblade knife, too. I’ll cut your eye out and go right on telling jokess.
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In football, I root for the Oakland Raiders because they hire castoffs, outlaws, malcontents, and fuckups, they have lots of penalties, fights, and paybacks, and because Al Davis told the rest of the pig NFL owners to go get fucked. Also, they don’t have a lot of Christians kneeling down to pray after touchdowns. Christians are ruining sports. Someday, the Raiders will be strong again, and they will dip the ball in shit and shove it down the throats of the wholesome, white, heartland teams that pray together and don’t deliver late hits.
You know the best thing I did for myself during the past five years? I told sports to go take a flying fuck. I was fed up with the way I related to professional sports, so I reordered the relationship on my own terms. I became a little more selective.
I couldn’t believe how much time I had wasted watching any old piece of shit ballgame that happened to show up on TV. I must have thought there was some inborn male obligation to tune in and root every time a bunch of sweaty assholes got together to mix it up in a stadium somewhere.
I also realized I was wasting perfectly good emotional energy by sticking with my teams when they were doing poorly. My rooting life was scarcely better than those Cubs fans who think it’s a sign of character to feel shitty all the time. It’s absurd.
I decided it’s not necessary to suffer and feel crappy just because my teams suck. What I do now is cut ‘em loose for awhile. I simply let them go about losing, as I go about living my life. Then, when they’ve improved, and are doing well once again, I get back on board and enjoy their success.
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GEORGE C A R L I N
. pressure, and widespread gambling scandals. An earthquake
Uj–. in a ballpark isn’t such a bad thing to me, either. I don’t give a shit about the outcome of the game, I’m just looking for an interesting story.
I pray that some year the baseball postseason will include
^ only teams with outdoor stadiums in cold-weather cities. And then I hope there are repeated freak storm systems that keep
K coming through the Midwest and the East, and all during the playoffs there are constant rainouts and postponements. And I pray for the whole thing to continue for months, so the games are pushed further and further back, and eventually the World Series is played in January. And then I hope it’s cold and windy and icy and snowy, and a lot of players get
Then there are other times when I’m not as positive. And I think to myself, Fuck sports! Fuck sweat, fuck jock itch, and fuck all people who are out of breath. Fuck the players,
0 the sports media, the owners, and above all, the sports fans. Double-fuck the sports fans. Actually, though, to tell you the truth, if I had to endure those owners on the same day-today basis as I do the sports fans, I’m sure the owners would
. quickly work their way to the bottom of my list. Lower than a snake’s ballbag. Remember, owners are always rotten people no matter what they own, and no matter where they turn up in life.
In their hatred for the players, the fans often forget that the real insects are the owners; the greedy swine owners who
b..T..a.i.n d. r o p p i n g s
are always pleading poverty. In 1980, Nelson Doubleday
5 paid $21.6 million for the Mets franchise. Today it’s worth over $200 million. Where’s the risk? And if it’s so hard to make money in baseball, why are all these maggot entrepreneur-hustlers around the country so eager to pay $95 mil-
^ lion for a last-place expansion team?
I’m not too thrilled with the sports media people, either.
k The talent is marginal, they bring nothing to the mix, and their palpable envy of the players is actually embarrassing. Many of these media stiffs were failed high school and college athletes and simply not good enough to make the cut. (Obviously, I’m excluding former pro ballplayers.) How dare such also-rans criticize athletes and their play? You wanna know the prob-
0 lem? Athletes get tons of money and pussy, and all the best drugs. The sports media don’t. Need any more on that?
Some baseball teams hire “ball girls” to retrieve foul balls that don’t go into the stands. But I’ve noticed many of these women are quite feminine and don’t throw very well. These
0 teams are making a mistake. I think they should hire lesbians
to do that job. Not femmes, but full-on, bad-ass, 90-mile-an
hour bull dykes. The kind you see in hardware stores. I’ll tell
you one thing, you’d get a lot more good plays and strong
1 return throws out there. And if some fan leaned out of the
» stands to pick up a foul ball, the “ball dyke” could drag him
onto the field and beat the shit out of him for about forty-five minutes. And if any baseball players tried to stop her, she could just deck them, too.
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E 0 R G E C A R L I N
Athletes like that physical shit. When they’re pleased with tl| each other they bump chests, butt heads, and bang forearms. Why don’t they just punch each other in the fuckin’ teeth? Wouldn’t that be great? Teammates, I mean. After a touchdown pass, why doesn’t the guy who caught the ball just go
^ over and kick the quarterback right in the nuts? Same with a slam dunk in basketball. The guy who scores oughta grab a
k, chair and beat the living shit out of the guy who fed him the ball. For about forty-five minutes. If this type of celebration were more common, the postgame show from the winners’ locker room would be a lot livelier.
And I think there should be at least one sport where the
A object is to kill someone. A team sport. Deathball. Let’s face it,
athletes are mostly physical freaks with serious personality
defects where competition is concerned, and they just love
someone to “motivate” them. Well, what greater motivation can
there be than trying to avoid being killed? It’s a fuckin’ natural!
And for me, what could be more fun than watching one of these
0 jackoffs motivate his ugly ass into an early grave every game?
Here’s another thing: I love losing streaks. I wish some year a baseball team would lose 162 games. I especially like decades-long, postseason losing streaks. In fact, as soon as my v teams are out of the running, I start actively rooting for the Cubs, Red Sox, Bills, Broncos, and Vikings to get as far as they can in the postseason so that ultimately they can let the big prize slip away one more time. I think it is an infinitely more interesting news story for a team to repeatedly fail at the highest level than it is for them to finally win. If the Cubs ever win
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b r a i n d r o p p i n
a World Series, the news coverage will be the most boring bunch of shit you can imagine.
And, although I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, you’ll have to admit it would sure be a lot of fun to see a couple of those chartered planes the athletes fly around in go down in flames. I know it might seem ghoulish to the overly squeamish, but I’d love to read about all the hassles they were having restocking the teams, and it would be fun to see the new lineups. Of course, all the stupid shit on TV about the funerals would be real boring.
P.S. Any professional sports team that has a “fight song” is automatically a bush-league, small-town team. Period.
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aat my uncle was good at. UloS.The piece movement. ucclSlKM- A person who blows clairvoyants.
. Clothing worn by light-skinned blacks who wish to be thought of as white.
When you lose a debate.
The sound a prostitute makes so you’ll think you’re a real good fuck.
CARL
; E 0 R C E
UrilQ uOfriC”. Driving to your connection’s house.
uEXdnUE’- Similar to drug traffic, but with a different destination.
DOUChf. A female duke.
? An eight-sided vagina. llinE”. A sexual lubricant popular with sluts.