george carlin people are stupid — a defense the man would tolerate

the line gets quoted on tee shirts now. people are stupid. carlin said it in a specific cadence and the internet stripped the cadence and kept the diagnosis. yesterday at the supermarket a man yelled at a self-checkout for being slow. i watched. carlin would have called it. i would call it overload. we disagree from the grave.

writing this from the desk, second monitor angled away from the corridor, mug parked on a coaster i bought because i am a person who buys coasters now. carla is upstairs in a vendor onboarding session that started at 9:14am. she will not surface until eleven. that gives me roughly a hundred minutes and one cold refill before the verdict has to be either filed or abandoned.

so. george carlin people are stupid is the version of the line that loses the math. the original bit had an equation in it. this version drops the equation and keeps the verdict, naked, three words wide, no setup, no escalation, no punchline. that is what a tee shirt does. it strips. and once a line has been stripped, the people wearing it are not, in fact, quoting carlin. they are quoting the strip.

george carlin people are stupid: the flattened version of carlin’s most famous line, with the math removed and only the verdict surviving. on tee shirts it reads as a closed sentence, not a joke. the original carried a median split. the souvenir carries an indictment. the difference is the entire act of comedy.

monitor parked, second screen angled away from the corridor. carla took the elevator forty-six minutes ago, slide notes in a manila folder, the kind of folder nobody actually uses. coffee cooling at the eleven o’clock position.

george carlin people are stupid, the line as people quote it

the version on the tee shirt reads people are stupid. four words including the verb. it is presented as carlin, sometimes attributed in small italics, sometimes not attributed at all, sometimes printed under a stencil of his face which makes the wearer feel like they have done research. they have not. they have done a transaction.

the original had architecture. the verdict version has none. the verdict version is what you are left with when the architecture has been removed for shipping. you can recognize it because nobody laughs when it is said aloud. people nod. nodding is not the response carlin built the bit for. carlin built the bit for laughter, which is a more specific thing than agreement.

the souvenir has the shape of the line and the temperature of an opinion. you can wear it on a tuesday and have a small day with it. but you are not, as the wearer, doing what carlin did. you are doing the cheap version of what carlin did. i would like that on the table before we proceed, because the rest of this post requires the table to be flat.

i looked it up, sort of. the line has versions across his 2008 special “it’s bad for ya” and across older bits that surface on rerun. the verdict-only formulation is not, in any of those versions, what he actually said. the verdict-only formulation is what survives after a screenshot.

the supermarket as a stress test for the line

here is where i would like to drop a single, witnessed event onto the verdict and see what it does. yesterday afternoon i went to the supermarket because i had run out of every food at once, which is the kind of thing that happens when you are a person whose grocery system is mostly improvised and which i defend as a lifestyle even though it is, on inspection, a problem.

at the self-checkout, the man two stations down was yelling at his screen. he had four items. one of them was a baguette. the baguette would not scan. he kept lifting it and slamming it down on the glass like a chef testing for stale. the screen kept asking him for his loyalty number. he did not have a loyalty number. he had four items and a baguette and a rising blood pressure.

the verdict-only carlin would say: people are stupid. file the man. close the case. move on. the tee shirt would, in this moment, agree with itself.

i, watching from station three with my own four items and my own un-baguetted total, did not file the man. the man, by appearances, had not eaten. the man, by his shoes, had been on his feet since six am. the man, by the way he kept glancing at his watch, had somewhere to be at four fifteen and no realistic path to getting there. the man was overloaded, not stupid. overload looks like stupid from the outside. the line on the tee shirt cannot tell the difference. the man on stage, with the timing and the mileage, would have. that is, i suspect, the gap between the souvenir and the original.

when individual cases collapse the generalization

a verdict generalizes. an event resists. the souvenir line is a verdict. the supermarket is an event. you cannot run the verdict on the event without breaking one of them. usually you break the event, because the verdict is shorter and shouts louder.

i watched the man finish. he eventually figured out that the baguette had to be weighed first, which the screen had not made clear, and which the staff member at the supervising desk had not noticed because she was on the phone with what sounded like her landlord. the man left with his baguette intact and his composure pretty much gone. he did not look stupid leaving. he looked tired. tired is a different word.

this is what carlin’s line, in its full version, actually understood. the math version think how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that was a structural joke about distribution. the verdict version is not a joke at all. it is a slogan. slogans do not understand the median. slogans understand the wall.

i am not, to be clear, defending the man’s slamming of the baguette. that was not great. the baguette was not the screen’s fault. but the slamming was a symptom of overload, not stupidity, and treating it as stupidity is the kind of category error that carlin himself, in another bit on another night, would have probably skewered. there is a version of carlin that would defend the man at the self-checkout. there is a version that would prosecute him. the souvenir version has only the prosecution, because that is what fits on cotton.

SLOGANS. DO NOT. UNDERSTAND. THE. MEDIAN.

carlin would have noticed, i think

i cannot speak for the man. nobody can. but i can say what i think he would have noticed at my supermarket yesterday, because his other bits are on the record, and the other bits, taken together, draw a line.

he would have noticed the baguette. he would have noticed the loyalty number prompt. he would have noticed that the staff member at the supervising desk was on a personal call. he would have noticed the screen’s timing. he would have noticed that the design of the self-checkout exists to remove a human salary from the company’s books while still requiring a human at the supervising desk to handle exactly the kind of failure the design itself produced. the bit, on a good carlin night, would not have been called people are stupid. the bit would have been called the supermarket is stupid, and a man with a baguette is just doing the work the supermarket assigned him. that is a longer title. that is also more accurate.

this is the part the souvenir loses. the souvenir flattens the comedian’s whole stance into a single consumer-grade verdict. the actual stance was angrier and more specific. the actual stance went after systems first and people second. the verdict-only version goes after people only. that is, on its face, a different politics, and i suspect carlin would have hated it.

also, while we are here. the spoon is a smaller bowl. that is one of mine, not his. i hold it. the man at the next station with the baguette would, i suspect, have laughed at the spoon line if the day had been going better. it was not going better. so he didn’t. that is fair. carlin would have understood.

verdict, the line is funnier than it is true

so where do i land. carlin’s bit, in its full architecture, is one of the cleanest jokes on the subject ever performed. the verdict-only version, the one on the tee shirt, the one that gets quoted at me by stefan when stefan has lost an argument about wine, is not a joke. it is a slogan with a famous name attached to give it weight it has not earned.

and stefan does quote it. stefan, who once ranked four bottles by price and called the ranking a palate, will end an argument with people are stupid, as carlin said, and walk away with the verdict in his pocket as if he had won. he has not won. he has invoked. invoking and winning are different. the difference is, again, the gap between the souvenir and the master. stefan would not have lasted ninety seconds at a carlin show. stefan, on a good night, would have ended up as material.

the line is funnier than it is true. that is the verdict, in eight words. the joke holds because the math is real. the verdict, stripped of math, becomes a tool people use to end conversations they would otherwise lose. carlin would, i suspect, prefer the joke. carlin would not have wanted to be the patron saint of the conversation-ending shrug. carlin wanted you to laugh and then think about the laugh. the souvenir wants you to nod and walk to your car.

i nod when stefan quotes it. i nod the way you nod when you are not really agreeing. and then i go back to my desk and write something like this, where i can finish the thought without stefan in the room. the desk is a better venue for this kind of work. the supermarket, as we have established, is a worse one. the man with the baguette, by now, is at home. i hope the baguette was good. i hope his four fifteen went okay. i suspect both of those things did not happen, and i suspect carlin, on a good night, would have known to hope for them anyway.

also, briefly: not every harsh word is doing the same job. the word fool, for instance, has a softer edge in english than stupid does. fool implies a moment, a costume almost, something temporary. stupid, in its souvenir form, implies a permanent state. carlin, who liked words and what they did, would have known the difference between calling someone a fool and calling them stupid, and his bits on language make that clear if you read enough of them. the borrowed sword, in this case, is the wrong sword. a fool has a way out. the souvenir does not offer one.

carla just got back from the third floor. she set down the manila folder and looked at my screen for a half-second too long. i tilted the angle. i think she saw the words “self-checkout” and assumed it was a complaint i was filing with HR. i did not correct her. some assumptions do their own work. mine, today, is to keep going.

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