Still Testing The Limits

SHOW: GEORGE CARLIN LIVE AT THE PARAMOUNT

TIME: MAY 12, 18, HBO

THE BOTTOM LINE: Now in his third incarnation, Carlin remains the most daring and impassioned comedian around.

PROWLING THE STAGE LIKE A FEral street preacher, George Carlin has launched into one of his carefully calculated rants, poised somewhere between comedy and a call to arms. Bad news, he insists, is what he most likes to watch on TV; it means the system is breaking down. "I want to see a paint factory blowing up.I want to see an oil refinery explode. I want to see a tornado hit a church on Sunday. I want to know there's some guy running through the K Mart with an automatic weapon firing at the clerks. I want to see thousands of people in the street killing policemen . . . "

Oops. Carlin's new hbo special was taped two weeks ago, well before the Los Angeles riots, but that won't make his bitterly ironic tirade any less discomfiting to viewers watching it now. Carlin himself, in fact, may be the only person it won't bother. Making people uneasy is his business.

On the increasingly crowded stand-up stage, Carlin remains in a spotlight by himself. Most current TV comics are interchangeable: dispensing predictable, painless gags about '90s values, sexual gamesmanship, TV sitcoms and Dan Quayle. After three decades in the business, Carlin, who turns 54 this week, is still testing the limits, challenging his audience, shouting from the depths of his social-activist soul.

Carlin is unfairly pigeonholed, however, as a leftover '60s radical. The real targets of his satire are cant and cliche, phoniness and self- righteousness, wherever he finds them. At the beginning of a 1990 HBO concert, he rattled off a list of New Age terms banned from his vocabulary: "I will not 'share' anything with you. I will not 'relate' to you, and you will not 'identify' with me. I will give you no 'input,' and I will expect no 'feedback.' " Euphemisms that cloud our thinking are another favorite topic: "Sometime during my life, toilet paper became bathroom tissue, false teeth became dental appliances, the dump became the landfill, partly cloudy became partly sunny."

Carlin can be perversely playful as well as pointedly satirical. He once suggested new rules for football (sample: leave the injured on the field), proposed that the Miss America Pageant "make the losers keep coming back until they win," and offered a new restaurant idea: all you can eat, to go. These are absurdist brainstorms that, in a few choice words, conjure up Marx Brothers movies.

What's remarkable about Carlin is that he has been a groundbreaker in at least three incarnations. In the mid-'60s he was a short-haired, fast-talking comedian who influenced a generation of stand-ups with his deft skewering of pop culture and the media. Others (like Carlin's mentor, Lenny Bruce) had poked fun at these subjects, but none with as sharp an eye or as much performing brio. Carlin's unctuous radio deejays, TV newscasters and commercial pitchmen were not simple parodies; he used them to satirize a whole society that had its priorities out of whack. "The sun did not come up this morning, huge cracks have appeared in the earth's surface, and big rocks are falling out of the sky," a Carlin newsman once announced. "Details 25 minutes from now on Action Central News."