I can’t remember a comedian who more obsessively dissected commonplace speech than George Carlin. I’m surprised YouTube has so little Carlin from the 1970s – I doubt I’m going out on a limb by calling it his defining period – but here’s a good sequence from the Tony Orlando and Dawn show from 1976.

He was also one of the leading figures in counterculture humor. There was no one else doing material like this in 1966.

He contended that he became a better comedian in his later years, and that may be true – you can watch performances from the 1990s and 2000s on YouTube and decide – but they didn’t have the impact of those earlier performances. Here’s a good interview with Carlin from Salon from February of this year.

An addition at 3:35 p.m.: John Nichols’ eulogy for Carlin at The Nation. Here’s an excerpt:

Carlin’s take on the Ronald Reagan administration is the best antidote to the counterfactual romanticization of the former president – in which even Barack Obama has engaged “ remains the single finest assessment of Reagan and his inner circle. While Carlin did not complain much about politicians, he made an exception with regard to the great communicator. Recorded in 1988 at the Park Theater in Union City, New Jersey, and later released as an album — What Am I Doing in New Jersey?,  his savage recollection of the then-concluding Reagan-Bush years opened with the line: “I really haven’t seen this many people in one place since they took the group photograph of all the criminals and lawbreakers in the Ronald Reagan administration.”

But there was no nostalgia for past fights, no resting on laurels, for this topical comedian. He read the papers, he followed the news, he asked questions “ the interviews I did with Carlin over the years were more conversations than traditional Q & A’s “ and he turned it all into a running commentary that focused not so much on politics as on the ugly intersection of power and economics.

No one, not Obama, not Hillary Clinton and certainly not John McCain, caught the zeitgeist of the vanishing American dream so well as Carlin. “The owners of this country know the truth: It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”