Your bag is empty.
When George Carlin stepped to the microphone at New York’s Beacon Theatre on March 30, 1996, the comedian wondered what it would look like if the death penalty was marketed as a televised sport. His absurd premise: Would an execution that everyone could take part in distract the public from all the other terrible stuff going on and the shortcomings of the nation’s elite?
“Let’s use capital punishment the same way we use sports and television in this country, to distract people and take their minds off how bad they’re being fucked by the upper 1 percent,” Carlin said during his 1996 HBO special, “George Carlin: Back in Town.” “Now, unfortunately, ‘Monday Night Football’ doesn’t last long enough. What we really need is year-round capital punishment on TV every night with sponsors! Gotta have sponsors. I’m sure as long as we’re killing people, Marlboro cigarettes and Dow Chemical will be proud to participate.”
If this sounds familiar, then you’ve probably seen a Carlin clip on social media amid the headlines about whether the firing-squad execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan should be live-streamed. After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he wanted Hasan’s scheduled Dec. 3 execution in Texas to be live-streamed so that people could “understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” President Donald Trump announced that the execution would not be available for public viewing. The president’s announcement came right after a nationwide poll from The Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos found that 8 in 10 Americans said Hasan’s execution should not be live-streamed to the public.
Still, many online critics pointed to Carlin’s prediction about what a future in which people were given the chance to watch capital punishment in real time might look like. Among them was Kelly Carlin-McCall, the late comedian’s daughter who tells Playboy that people have turned to her father and his brand of absurdist comedy to help make sense of what’s going on during the second Trump administration.
“He takes a premise and takes it to the absolute most absurd version of it, to the point where it’s so absurd that it’s unbelievable or not even possible,” Carlin-McCall, a writer and radio personality, says of her father, who died in 2008 at the age of 71. “His level of absurdity in 1996 is what we are living through in reality right now.”
In “Back in Town,” Carlin’s ninth HBO special focused on topics that, he said at the time, “have a certain timeliness.” It’s why he opened the special with nine minutes on abortion before segueing into the sanctity of life and capital punishment.
“I don’t like wasting the effort it takes to write good material to throw something away six months or six weeks or six days later,” Carlin told the Associated Press in 1996. “This is my art; this is what I do to be in the world … I have huge files of ideas and notes.” He added, “It’s just that I take it all very seriously and, you know, I work hard on these things. And I like them to really represent my point of view and my attitude. Which is pretty nihilistic.”
The comedian told the AP 30 years ago that he rooted for the end of civilization — “I root for the end of everything, and I enjoy watching it decline” — and digging into capital punishment was one way of doing so. As part of his riff on executions as public spectacle, Carlin floated some ideas for making this happen, including “naked upside down crucifixions on TV once a week at halftime in the ‘Monday Night Football’ game.”
“I honestly believe that if you make the death penalty a little more entertaining, and learn to market it correctly, you just might be able to raise enough money to balance the stupid fucking budget!” Carlin exclaimed.
In the days following Hegseth’s initial vow to live-stream Hasan’s execution, Carlin’s clips were resurfaced and spread across social media, with many internet commenters praising him as a prophet and a genius. A similar result unfolded in 2022, when his riff on abortion from the same comedy special went viral after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Carlin-McCall says that her father’s material resonates with so many today because of how “he understood the mind of distraction and corruption, and played it out to the nth degree.”
“Clearly, he had a thought experiment he was doing and, of course, he was doing it with great humor and panache,” she says to Playboy. “It’s pretty amazing how accurate he was, on some levels, about what we’re living through right now.”
She doesn’t know what her father would think about the current state of the world, but she does understand how much he valued staying informed to what’s going on so that we can look out for each other.
“People are ultimately total idiots and selfish and greedy, but at a higher sense of ourselves, we’re here to take care of each other and protect each other,” she says. “And he did that in his life.”
