In I Kinda Like It, Mr. Carlin addressed mass killings in a way that seemed on the surface out of touch with the tragedy that followed. In a cavalier tone, he says that he enjoys news of disasters the way a sports fan raves about seeing breaking records. An earthquake, he says in an outer-borough accent, put up some really big numbers, adding that hes always rooting for a really high death toll.
While this can seem like cheap provocation compared with his more famous bits, like the one inveighing against the seven words you cant say on television, gleefully imagining mass destruction had been a regular part of his stand-up for years. I watch television news for one thing only entertainment, he said in Jammin in New York, his 1992 special. My favorite thing is accidents and fires. Im not interested in the budget. You show me a hospital on fire and Im a happy guy.
What Mr. Carlin is doing here is satirizing American blood lust, bringing to the surface the impulse that makes professional wrestling and crime stories so popular. As he put it more bluntly in 1992, At least I admit it.
I Kinda Like It adds a more baroque voice to this satire of our dark, repressed thrills. After saying that he enjoys the excitement of people dying, then comparing massacres and natural disasters in the voice of a demented sociopath, Mr. Carlin imagines the apex of calamity, putting every disaster movie to shame.
His dizzyingly dense story includes flood, power failure, traffic jams, global warming, cholera, typhoid fever and a conflagration that wipes out North America. And then things go really bad. Shifting into a cosmically fantastical mode, Mr. Carlin imagines this disaster leading to the breakdown of the molecular structure of the atmosphere and changing the laws of nature. Burning clouds of flaming rain fly upward, the moon explodes and the dead return to life.
Theres a literary quality to the grotesque and often surreal imagery of this story (Mr. Carlin developed material in performance but began on the page), leaving behind punch lines and aiming for an almost metaphysical sense of the absurd in which people are inconsequential specks in a vast Lovecraftian universe.
What really distinguishes this from Mr. Carlins previous work is that it becomes totally unhinged from logic. He was nothing if not a rigorous thinker, who made you laugh by finding his way through arguments that led to outrageous conclusions like his brief against the sanctity of life, zeroing in on exceptions (Doesnt apply to cancer cells, does it? You rarely see a bumper sticker that says Save the Tumors) while arguing that its really driven by the self-interest of the living. But in I Kinda Like It, his arguments gradually unravel, deconstruct and are interrupted by supernatural details and then pure nonsense. What begins as satire devolves into madness, culminating in a nightmarish dinner party attended by bitter, resentful zombies, all named Uncle Dave.
At the end of this parade of catastrophes, these bitter men gather around a table and spew resentments about their children, parents, the government and minorities. Their disgust spins out of them into what Mr. Carlin describes as a swirling pool of hate that expands beyond the universe and explodes in a kind of second big bang. The new world that emerges is utopian, and every Uncle Dave wins the lottery every week. Out of disaster comes nirvana.
