Attended the taping of tonight's "Daily Show," and what a nice way they sent off George Carlin.
"I'm getting awfully tired of people we need, leaving us," Jon Stewart said at the end of the show. When he announced Carlin's death, some audience members — who obviously had not looked up at any of the news tickers or watched a jumbo screen at any point in their touring of NYC that day — could be heard gasping. Then, Stewart introduced a pitch-perfect "moment of Zen": a joke about the Gulf War that Carlin told in 1992 about the war's two main architects: And the punchline: "Just remember the names of the two men running that war: Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. Somebody got blanked in the ass!"
(Yes, I could have spelled out the dirty word for you. But wasn't one of the reasons Pacifica vs. FCC — the ruling that got the government into the indecency business, after a radical radio station played Carlin's "7 Dirty Words" routine — wasn't one reason that ruling was so stupid the fact that most mass media self-regulate their language? Like I just did?)
Anyway, I heard from a network publicist that Comedy Central was planning to air the language unbleeped ... when the show reairs in the middle of the night, by which time it will be in safe harbor from coast to coast. I can't stay up to confirm it, and I don't have a DVR here in New York, but I'm sure they could get away with it.
Stewart spent a fair amount of time warming up the crowd before the show — almost as much time as his warmup guy, Paul Mercurio. He engaged a couple of his interlocutors in longer conversations, including one woman who announced that since her last visit to the show she had beaten cancer (big applause). Another eager audience member leaped up to say she was a professor at SUNY-Stony Brook and taught a class in which "The Daily Show" was assigned viewing.
Stewart looked incredulous. His immediate and hilarious response: "What do you teach, Bullsh*t 101?"
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