stupid people george carlin

carlin had a routine. think of how stupid the average person is, then realize half of them are stupider. it gets a laugh. it always gets a laugh. i would like to put his routine on one side of a table and my own list on the other and see which one survives a closer read.

the line is the kind of line that people attribute to him by half. they get the rhythm right and the math wrong. i have heard it mangled in person, by an actual man, holding an actual loaf, on a friday i was supposed to be buying milk. that man is in this post. he is the reason for this post.

writing this from a chair the company would prefer i used for the pipeline forecast. it is 11:23am, friday, the slack notifications have multiplied to seven and i have answered, so far, none of them. a vendor demo is happening in the room behind me; i can hear the words holistic and roadmap through the wall. i have, by my read, the rest of the morning.

stupid people george carlin: the line everyone half-remembers — that the average person is stupid and half are stupider — comes from a 1990s carlin standup bit. it is funnier than it is true, and true enough to keep getting laughs three decades later. it deserves a sit-down rather than a t-shirt.

HALF. ARE. STUPIDER. THAN. THAT.

so. the joke survives. the joke also keeps getting cited like a study. the joke is not a study. it is a rant carlin built to land in a room full of people who, at the time, mostly agreed. i would like to do the rare thing and read it as a paragraph rather than a punchline. it’ll take a table. for the longer case on what stupid actually is, in plain language, gentler than people pretend, see the pillar piece i wrote in this same chair last month.

Table of Contents

stupid people george carlin, the line everyone half-remembers

here is the actual structure of his line, on the page, without the timing. the average person, by which he means the median, is stupid. then — and this is the move — he asks you to consider that, by definition, half of all people are below that median. therefore, half of everyone is stupider than the already-stupid average. the audience laughs because the math is, for a comedian, suspiciously airtight.

the math is, in fact, structurally a tautology — half of any distribution is, by definition, on the lower half of that distribution — dressed in a sweater of contempt. the contempt is the part that lands. the math hides behind it. the audience hears the math and concludes the contempt is endorsed by arithmetic. it is not. arithmetic is, on this point, neutral. carlin was not.

i’m not going to try to prove him wrong. i agree with most of him. i am going to try to read him slowly, which is, on the evidence of crowds, the one thing his fans never do. the man earned the right to be read slowly.

table, carlin take vs my take, side by side

the cleanest way i can think to do this is a table. carlin’s verdict on the left, mine on the right, with a column for the difference in the middle. i drafted this in a notebook during the demo. some of the handwriting is questionable. i have transcribed in good faith.

carlin’s take	where it actually lands	my amendment
half of everyone is stupider than the average	true by definition; useless as a verdict	most people are average at most things and excellent at one weird specific thing nobody asks about
stupid is a fixed property	implies the speaker is exempt	stupid is a state. i was in it last week, with a fork. i may be in it again by sunday.
the audience is in on it	the audience is, statistically, also half below average	if the math is real, the laughter is, on inspection, half-self-directed
stupidity is the problem	true sometimes; not all the time	confidence without revision is the problem. stupid that revises is just a weekday.
the line is funny	yes	conceded without footnote
the line is also a verdict	verdicts age worse than jokes do	read as a joke: durable. read as a verdict: a t-shirt with an opinion on it.

the table looks tidy. the table is a lie of presentation. in real life there is a coffee ring, a smudge, and a margin where i drew a small picture of a category i have spent a lot of time defending wearing, for some reason, a small hat.

where i agree with him, briefly

two things, briefly.

one: the median is, in fact, lower than people want it to be. the man at the bread aisle — the one who started this post — was holding a loaf and explaining to a stranger that carlin said the average person is, like, eighty percent stupid. that is not what carlin said. that is the median, holding a loaf, paraphrasing. carlin would have used the moment in the next bit.

two: comedians are, by trade, allowed to be wrong faster than essayists are. the bit is a vehicle; the wheels are the laugh; the engine is the contempt. that is the right shape for a comedy bit and the wrong shape for a public ethic. his fans, on the evidence of t-shirts, did not always notice.

where i would push back from the bar stool

here is what the line, on inspection, gets a little sideways.

the bit treats stupid as a property — a thing you have, a thing you are, a placard you wear on your chest in the bread aisle. on my evidence — one kitchen, one couch, one supermarket, one fork named sparky who carries a small black mark like a service medal, and one microwave that is currently the seventh — stupid is not a property. stupid is a weather event. it shows up. it leaves. it leaves things damaged on the way out. it does not, on the evidence, take up permanent residence.

the man in the bread aisle, in this frame, is not stupid. he is a person doing a stupid thing for thirty seconds — paraphrasing a comedian he likes, in a room where nobody asked. that is, by my read, every one of us, on a sufficient number of weekdays. carlin included. the speaker of the line, deployed at a dinner party to feel briefly above the median, is doing the same thing, on the same shelf — the line points at everyone except the speaker, which is, on inspection, always the tell.

this is the same skepticism i hold toward the comedian-merchandise pipeline more broadly. the laugh travels. the doctrine travels with it. the doctrine, separated from the laugh, is a worse object than it looked like in the room. carlin’s bit is one of those. ron white has a sturdier one. the merch on both is good. the doctrine on both is, on inspection, not.

why the line still travels three decades later

the line travels because the structure travels. think of how X the average person is, and remember half are even more X. you can put any adjective in there. lazy. mean. tired. cheap. the structure is, briefly, free. anyone can borrow it. people do, every day, on every platform, mostly without crediting him.

i hold one related take, which i drop here as cited rather than argued: sundays should end at 6 pm. carlin would have agreed. he had a sunday-night quality to him. so does the bread aisle, on a friday after work, when a man with a loaf decides to do philosophy at a stranger.

related fragment: i once tried to do my own haircut, with a mirror and a pair of kitchen scissors, while listening to a carlin bit i had heard four times. the diy haircut is, in retrospect, the experimental data for this entire post. think how stupid the average person is. i was below that average for, by my count, eleven minutes. there is photo evidence somewhere; it has been deleted from the visible part of the cloud.

the demo behind me has reached the part where someone asks about timeline and the presenter says great question. the meeting will run long. in my favour.

verdict, the man was right, i would still amend

so the verdict.

carlin was right enough to keep being quoted. he was wrong enough that the quoting, decades later, has gotten lazier than he was. the line is not a verdict. it is a setup the room mistook for a thesis. the thesis, separated from the room, does not hold its shape — it folds, slightly, and sags in the middle. carlin would not have minded. he would have rewritten it for the next special. carlin was a working comedian, which means, by trade, a person who revises. the line on the t-shirt is the line that does not.

my amendment, then. half of everyone is stupider than average — yes, by definition. but everyone is stupider than themselves on a sufficient number of mornings. the average is moving. the bread aisle is, on any given friday, full of evidence of revision in progress. carlin’s joke is durable. his verdict is mortal. those are different shelves.

for the underlying word and what it actually means, see the open sentence i sat with for an hour and a half, and the registered domain version i imagined into existence in a parody of an entire genre. four posts on this adjective, including this one. the bread-aisle man would have liked that, probably, or pretended to.

the demo wraps in nine minutes. i am going to close this and reopen the forecast spreadsheet and look at it the way a man looks at a magazine in a waiting room.

yours stupidly,
idiot again
a man who has stood in the bread aisle and listened

P.S. the loaf the man was holding, by my read, was a multigrain. carlin would have used that detail. i have used it instead. consider the bit, in a small way, continued.

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