La Voz de Galicia – June 3, 2022 →
It was an HBO documentary about New York comedian George Carlin, but the truth is that many of his thoughts felt as if they were small philosophical pills or predictions about the future. The way that the film’s directors (Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio) had of narrating his personal and professional story makes this piece an indispensable work in order to understand contemporary American society. George Carlin’s American Dream is a journey into the life and career of an artist who, in some way, had found his voice in each moment of his existence, and had shared those queries, publicly, through his art.
Many of his monologues form part of the history of the genre «stand-up comedy,» references that help us reflect about themes sometimes so complex that only with humor can one get to question them. And even though Carlin died in 2008 and did not get to fully live in this era of hyper connected humans to social media, while one hears him talk about absolutely everything, one also is left curious to know how he would joke about this new reality where, using his own words, «the rise of ignorance» is no longer an exception, but something constant…
At a moment in the documentary, Carlin talks about how «people are wonderful,» about how he «loves individuals» and about how he «hates groups of people with a common purpose,» I suppose in the context of the importance of critical thinking, personal and individual…but if we connect this idea of the individual and the group to the «rise of ignorance,» then like Carlin himself predicted, we have a time bomb that has simply exploded already…
