Napalm & Silly Putty

by George Carlin

  Then there are the recipients who try to anticipate what degree of affection they’re going to receive.

  “Did Susan send her love?”

  “No, Dave. She only sent her regards.”

  “That’s funny, usually she sends her love.”

  “Well, not this time. In fact, she specifically told me, ‘Don’t give Dave any of my love.’ It seems she’s running short of love and has to be careful whom she gives it to. However, she did say she’s overstocked with regards and wants you to have a whole bunch of them. So, be satisfied, Dave. Take your regards, and get the fuck out of my life!”

  Well, he should damn well be satisfied with regards; it’s a lot better than simply being sent someone’s “best.” There are some people who just send you their best.

  “Give my best to Dave.”

  “Your best what, Susan? If this is your best, perhaps you’d better keep it to yourself.”

  And yet, receiving someone’s “best ”is better than simply being “remembered to, ”isn’t it? That’s the lowest of all. Hardly worth even telling the poor person.

  “Remember me to Dave.”

  “Okay.”

  “Dave? You remember Susan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, she remembers you, too.”

  That’s it, my job is done. I’m off now to find Tex, so I can tell him Billy Bob said “Howdy.”

  One final thing. There are times when someone wants you to convey more than simply love. They want you to give someone “a big hug and kiss.” Now they’ve got you trafficking in sex.

  “Give Joachim a big hug and a kiss for me.”

  Usually it’s women. I find that women are a bit more expressive at times like these. And sometimes they’re really explicit.

  “Bye-bye, Elena. Drive carefully. Give Flaco a nice blow job for me. And don’t forget to lick his asshole!”

  “Okay, Belinda. But next time let’s get Klaus to take care of that!”.

  EXPRESSIONS I QUESTION

  There are many expressions we take for granted. We use them all the time, yet never examine them carefully. We just say them as if they really made sense.

  Legally drunk. Well, if it’s legal, what’s the problem? “Leave me alone, officer, I’m legally drunk!”

  You know where you can stick it. Why do we assume everyone knows where they can stick it? Suppose you don’t know? Suppose you’re a new guy, and you have absolutely no idea where you can stick it? I think there ought to be a government booklet entitled Where to Stick It. Now that I think of it, I believe there is a government booklet like that. They send it to you on April 15.

  Undisputed heavyweight champion. Well, if it’s undisputed, what’s all the fighting about? To me, “undisputed ”means we all agree. Here you have two men beating the shit out of one another over something they apparently agree on. Makes no sense.

  It’s the quiet ones you gotta watch. Every time I see a television news story about a mass murderer, the guy’s neighbor always says, “Well, he was very quiet.” And someone I’m with says, “It’s the quiet ones you gotta watch.”

  This sounds like a very dangerous assumption. I’ll bet anything that while you’re busy watching a quiet one, a noisy one will kill you.

  Suppose you’re in a bar, and one guy is sitting over on the side, reading a book, not bothering anybody. And another guy is standing. up at the front, bangin’ a machete on the bar, screamin’, “I’m gonna kill the next motherfucker who pisses me off!”

  Who you gonna watch?

  Lock him up and throw away the key. This is one you hear a lot from men. Men like to talk that way; it makes ’em feel tough. A guy sees a rapist on the TV news, he says, “You see that guy? They oughta lock him up, and throw away the key.”

  This is really stupid. First of all, every time the guy’s gotta take a shit, you’re gonna have to call the locksmith. If he’s in prison thirty years, even if he’s eatin’ government cheese, it’s gonna cost you a fortune.

  Second, where do you throw the key? Right out in front of the jail? His friends’ll find it! How far can you throw a key? Fifty, sixty feet the most. Even if you hold it flat on its side and scale it, whaddaya get? An extra ten feet, tops! This is a stupid idea that needs to be completely rethought.

  Down the tubes. That’s one you hear a lot. People say, “This country is goin’ down the tubes.” What tubes? Have you seen any tubes? Where are these tubes? And where do they go? And how come there’s more than one tube? It would seem to me for one country all you need is one tube. Does every state have to have its own tube? One tube is all you need.

  But a tube that big? Somebody would have seen it by now. Some-body would’ve said, “Hey Joey! Lookit the fuckin’ tube! Big-ass fuckin’ tube, over here!” You never hear that. You know why? No tubes! We don’t have tube one. We are, sorry to say, tubeless.

  Takes the cake. “Boy, he really takes the cake.” Where? Where do you take a cake? To the movies? You know where I would take a cake? Down to the bakery, to see the other cakes. And how come he takes the cake? How come he doesn’t take the pie? A pie is easier to carry than a cake. “Easy as pie.” A cake is not too hard to carry, either. “Piece of cake.”

  The greatest thing since sliced bread. So this is it? A couple of hundred thousand years …sliced bread? What about the Pyramids? The Panama Canal? The Great Wall of China? Even a lava lamp, to me, is greater than sliced bread. What’s so great about sliced bread? You got a knife, you got a loaf of bread. Slice the fuckin’ thing!! And get on with your life.

  Out walking the streets. This is another one you hear from men. Some guy sees a rapist on the news. Same rapist as before; only this time he’s being released. The guy says, “You see that? You see that guy? They’re lettin’ him go! Now, instead of bein’ in prison, he’s out walkin’ the streets!”

  How do we know? How do we know he’s out walkin’ the streets? Maybe he’s home bangin’ the baby-sitter. Not everybody who gets a parole is out walkin’ the streets. A lot of times they steal a car. We oughta be glad. “Thank God he stole a car. At least he’s not out walkin’ the streets.”

  Fine and dandy. That’s an old-fashioned one, isn’t it? You say to a guy, “How are ya?” He says, “Fine and dandy.” Not me. I never say that. You know why? Because I’m never both those things at the same time. Sometimes I’m fine. But I’m not dandy. I might be close to dandy. I might be approaching dandy. I might even be in the general vicinity of dandyhood. But not quite fully dandy. Other times, I might indeed be highly dandy. However, not fine. One time, 1978. August. For about an hour. I was both fine and dandy at the same time. But nobody asked me how I was. I coulda told ’em, “Fine and dandy!” I consider it a lost opportunity.

  Walking papers. Some guy gets fired, they say, “Well, they gave him his walkin’ papers today.” Lemme ask you something. Did you ever get any walking papers? Seriously? Believe me, in my life I got fired a lot of times. I never got any walkin’ papers. I never got a pink slip, either. You know what I would get? A guy would come around to my desk and say, “Get the fuck outta here!!” You don’t need paper for that.

  The riot act. They keep saying they’re going to read that to you. Tell the truth, have you heard this thing at all? Ever?

  It’s especially a problem when you’re a kid. They like to threaten you.

  “You wait’ll your father comes home. He’s gonna read you the riot act!”

  “Oh yeah? Well, tell him I already read it myself! And I didn’t like it! I consider it wordy and poorly thought out. If he wants to read me somethin’, how about The Gentleman’s Guide to the Golden Age of Tongue-Kissing?

  More than happy. I’ll bet you say that sometimes. I’ll bet you say, “Oh, I’d be more than happy to do that.” How can you be more than happy? To me, this sounds like a dangerous mental condition. “We had to put Laszlo under physical restraint; he was…well, he was more than happy.”

  One more of these expressions: In your own words. You hear
it in classrooms. And courtrooms. They’ll say, “Tell us…in your own words…” Do you have your own words? Personally, I’m using the ones everybody else has been using. Next time they tell you to say something in your own words, say, “Nigflot blorny quando floon.”

  SHORT TAKES

  I don’t hear much of that elevator music anymore. What’s going on?

  IT’S TIME TO START SLAPPING PEOPLE

  Don’t you think there were probably a lot of singers with great voices who never got famous because they were too ugly to stand up and be seen in public?

  I can’t wait to see one of those actor-assholes who drive race cars get killed on TV.

  Why do women wear evening gowns to nightclubs? Why don’t they wear nightgowns?

  I think many years ago an advanced civilization intervened with us genetically and gave us just enough intelligence to develop dangerous technology but not enough to use it wisely. Then they sat back to watch the fun. Kind of like a human zoo. And you know what? They’re getting their money’s worth.

  After you die, your “stuff ”becomes your “personal effects.”

  GOD BLESS US ALL. RIGHT IN THE MOUTH

  I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven’t tried that for a while. Maybe this time it’ll work.

  People ask me if I have an e-mail address, and I say, “www.fuckyou.com@blowme/upyourass.” And they seem to understand.

  Message to the Denver Nuggets regarding Columbine High School: There’s no reason to cancel a sporting event just because some kids kill each other. Try to concentrate on basketball and leave the life-and-death shit to someone else.

  Capitalism tries for a delicate balance: It attempts to work things out so that everyone gets just enough stuff to keep them from getting violent and trying to take other people’s stuff.

  Baseball bats are now the preferred weapon for many drug gangs and others who have a business need to administer behavioral reminders. They’re cheap, lethal, legal, untraceable, and hey! It’s the national pastime.

  Dying must have survival value. Or it wouldn’t be part of the biological process.

  Why is it that, when making reference to something in the past, people often think they have to say, “I hope I’m not dating myself ”? Listen, if you’re so embarrassed by your age there’s a simple solution: open a vein.

  I don’t have hobbies, I have interests. Hobbies cost money. Interests are free.

  With all the presidential administrations we’ve had, I’m sure that by now there must have been at least one person who, besides being in the cabinet, was also in the closet.

  I don’t like it when I’m in an audience and the emcee tells us to give someone a welcome specific to that city: “Let’s all get together and give this little lady a nice Toledo welcome.” I’ve often thought if I were from Toledo it would be fun now and then to give someone a Baltimore welcome, just to break the emcee’s balls. Or maybe slip in an exotic Budapest welcome when no one is expecting it. One thing I would never do is give someone a Dallas welcome. That’s what JFK got. Dallas welcomes don’t last too long.

  You rarely see an elderly midget. Apparently their life spans are shorter too.

  A PEAR IS A FAILED APPLE

  You keep hearing that society’s greatest tasks are educating people and getting them jobs. That’s great. Two things people hate to do: go to school and go to work.

  We busy ourselves with meaningless gestures such as Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which applies primarily to white, middle-class daughters. More help for the wrong people.

  People seem to think that if there’s some problem that makes them unhappy in this country, all they have to do is stage a big march and everything will change. When will they learn?

  Complaint: Where did this dumb-ass Sammy Sosa thumping-your-chest, kissing-your-fingers, flashing-the-peace-sign nonsense come from? What’s that stupid shit all about? Geraldo does a variation on it. It strikes me as pretentious, meaningless, pseudoreligious bullshit.

  I don’t know about you, but I really have no problem with atrocities. What’s the big deal? Lighten up.

  Can placebos cause side effects? If so, are the side effects real?

  When hundreds of people are killed in an airplane crash I always wonder if maybe there wasn’t one guy, a little behind schedule that day, who ran down the last few hundred yards of the airport concourse to make the plane on time. And when he finally sat down in his seat, out of breath, he was really glad he made it. And then an hour later the plane goes down. What goes through his mind? Do you think maybe in those last few moments, as he plunges to the Earth he wishes he’d had a heart attack while running through the airport?

  Why do they bother with a suicide watch when someone is on death row? “Keep an eye on this guy. We’re gonna kill him, and we don’t want him to hurt himself.”

  I notice at Jewish weddings they break a glass. You ever been to an Irish wedding? Glasses, bottles, mirrors, tables, chairs, arms, legs, the band instruments, and the groom’s neck. We don’t fuck around. Mazel tov!

  HOW SOON IS INTERMISSION?

  I recently attended an avant-garde play. Here’s what it said in the program:

  An Anteater, a Tire Iron and a Blue Hat

  by Zal Fenchley

  Act One

  SCENE 1 Laura’s living room, several weeks later.

  SCENE 2 Easter, aboard a Turkish woman’s thigh.

  SCENE 3 Deep within the colon of a woolly mammoth. 16, 376 B.C.

  SCENE 4 Inside a sailor’s shorts during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Act Two

  SCENE 1 On a French sidewalk, six feet from escargot vomit.

  SCENE 2 Inside a condom in Haifa. Jewish New Year.

  SCENE 3 At your aunt’s house. Soon.

  Act Three

  SCENE 1 In a Shriner’s hatband following oral sex.

  SCENE 2 Down where Arturo used to live. Not that long ago.

  Act Four

  John Lennon two songs (not tonight).

  HAVE A GOOD TIME

  You know what bothers me? People who want to know the time. The ones who come up and ask me, “What time is it?” as if I, personally, were responsible for keeping track of such things.

  Sometimes they phrase it a little differently. They’ll say, “Do you have the time?” And I say, “No. I don’t believe I do. I certainly didn’t have it this morning when I left the house. Could you possibly have left it somewhere? You know, now that you mention it, I believe the navy has the time. In Washington. They keep it in an observatory or something, and they let a little of it out each day. Not too much, of course. Just enough. They wouldn’t want to give us too much time; we might not use it wisely.” Sometimes, in a playful mood, when asked if I have the time, I’ll say, “Yes, ”and simply walk away.

  When Is It, Anyway?

  I do that because I hate to disappoint people. You see, there is no time. There’s just no time. I don’t mean, “We’re late, there’s no time.” I mean, there is no time.