• by Jack Feuer , June 25, 2008

When I first heard him, I had long hair and a chip on my shoulder. The sacred store hadn't closed, and the music still played. He was hilarious. He was the wisest man in the world. He said: "The quality of our thoughts and ideas are only as good as the quality of our language."

Later, I married, moved to the suburbs and became a Republican. But he didn't change. And although I wouldn't have believed it was possible, he was even funnier. He asked: "Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?"

Eventually, I got divorced, came to my political senses, and moved to a two-bedroom at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains. A year ago, I heard my son shrieking with laughter at a video he was playing on the laptop. It was the wisest man in the world again, giving a lecture on seven interesting words, mesmerizing another young punk.

The magnificent old comic was just as funny and, alas, even more relevant than he had been 30 years before. He said: "I like to piss off any group that takes itself a little too seriously." His name was George Carlin, and he was one of the greatest social commentators this benighted nation has ever known.

He was also the most extraordinary marketing critic we have ever seen.

As far as I know, Carlin never took on the ad business per se. I never heard a Martin Sorrell bit, a fragmentation joke, a Crispin crack or a Nielsen riff. Still, Carlin knew the dark secret that lurks like an ulcer deep within every buyer, planner, art director, copywriter, vice president, cultural anthropologist, evangelist, user-experience specialist and media reporter. He pierced marketing's absurd pieties about serving a need. He made jokes about it.

He said, "Only a nation of unenlightened half-wits would have taken this beautiful place and turned it into what it is today--a big, fucking shopping mall. They put the mini malls in between the major malls, and in between the mini malls they put the mini marts. And in between the mini marts you got the car lots, gas stations, muffler shops, laundry mats, cheap motels, strip joints and dirty bookstores. America the beautiful. One big transcontinental commercial cesspool."

If Carlin were an ad guy, he'd write the most brilliant creative briefs you ever heard. About the dumbing down of our culture, Carlin warned that "pretty soon all you'll need to get into college is a fucking pencil." He knew that buying things is "the only true American value that's left." And about his country, he said, "I love this place. I love the freedoms we used to have."

Jerry Seinfeld wrote in The New York Times yesterday that, "every comedian does a little George." I think we could all use a little George. Carlin, in fact, should be a subject of study in every marketing, advertising and media course in the country.

Which, as he would probably phrase it, would just be the right fucking thing to do.