Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? by George Carlin
		Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended)
		Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com
	Riffs If you think George Carlin is funny, you’re likely to enjoy his latest book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? While reading him brings less pleasure than seeing or listening to him, you can almost hear his voice when you read the pages of this book. The challenge to readers is to try to match Carlin’s impeccable timing with the pace at which you read the sentences of When Will Jesus. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 42-49: JACKO BEATS THEM ALL I don’t care if Michael Jackson freaked off with little boys or not. It doesn’t bother me. Fuck those kids. And fuck their greedy parents too. What’s important to me is that Michael is the greatest entertainer who ever lived. Bar none. Watch him dance; pay attention to the showmanship. No one ever came close. Elvis was a bogus white guy with sex appeal and good looks who ripped off a lot of great black music, watered it down, and made it safe for lame whites who couldn’t handle the experience of raw, emotional black music. Never grew as an artist; remained an entertainer. Fuck Elvis. Sammy Davis Jr.? Nice try. Ordinary dancer, ordinary singer, second-rate impressionist. I also didn’t like the insincere sincerity. But he was a nice man, personally; I give him credit for that. Frank Sinatra? Great singer of songs, among the best. Superb musician. Grew as an artist. No showmanship, though. Arrogant, too. And mean to ordinary people. Fuck him. Michael Jackson buries them all. I say give him a bunch of kids and let him dance. LET’S GET REAL, HERE I’ve decided to cash in on TV’s reality-show trend. I have several ideas, but they may need some work before I approach the networks. Here’s what I’m working on: ISLAND CUISINE This idea grew out of Survivor, but I have a new twist: You put twelve people on a barren island, and you let them starve to death. You make sure they get no food, but you provide plenty of fresh drinking water—you don’t want them to die of thirst, you want them to starve to death. That would be entertaining enough, but here’s the fun. You make sure half the contestants are large, aggressive, physically fit individuals, and the other half are small, mild-mannered and physically weak. Then you wait them out and see who survives—and, more fun, you watch how they do it. The show is called Guess Who’s for Dinner. The only part I haven’t decided yet is whether to provide utensils. GETTIN’ HIGH AND HAVIN’ FUN Here’s another idea I think has a good shot: Maniac on Drugs. Each week you put a different homicidal maniac in a van filled with assault rifles and you provide him with large amounts of speed, crack, acid and PCP. Then you let him drive around New York City for several days, and you videotape everything he does. Naturally, you clear all this with the police, so they don’t interfere with the smooth flow of the show. At the end of thirteen weeks, you take all the psychos, give them a fresh supply of drugs and turn them loose at Disney World with rocket-propelled grenades. Actually, now that I think about it, this idea is too good for the networks; I’m gonna put it on pay-per-view. Here’s a variation for the finale, in case the Disney people get squeamish. You give the maniacs the same drugs, but instead of grenade launchers, you go back to the assault rifles. Everything’s the same, but this time you put them on an ordinary, nonstop passenger train from New York to Los Angeles. You strap video cameras to their heads and let them run loose on the train, allowing them to befriend the other passengers. Remember, it’s nonstop, no one can get off. I guarantee you’d get some really great footage. By the way, to save a little money, this could also be done on a Greyhound bus. But you’d need a really good driver who isn’t easily distracted. GUYS’ NIGHT OUT Here’s the one I’m proudest of because it took the most thought. I call it Lucky Bachelor. Our chosen guy is selected from letters sent in to the show. In step one, the lucky bachelor is sent out on three separate occasions to pick up women in cheap bars and bring each of them to a hotel where he tries to fuck them. If they go along easily, he then convinces them to commit a perverted act involving a floor lamp, a woodpecker and a box of rubber bands—an act most peopie wouid consider completely depraved. All this activity is videotaped. In step two, we stop three men at random on the street, show them the videos and ask them which of the women the lucky bachelor should marry. That woman is called the designated bride. We then ask the two losing women to vote on which one of the three random street guys looks like the best fuck. That guy is called the designated, best-fuck street guy. In step three, we take the two losing street guys and the two losing bar girls and feed them near-fatal doses of aphrodisiacs, put them in thong bathing suits and turn them loose in an adult sex shop with unlimited credit. This footage, strictly an added feature, could possibly be some of the liveliest on the show. Now, the alert reader is probably wondering what happened to our original lucky bachelor. Well, in step four we arrange for him and the designated best-fuck street guy to stage a bare-knuckle fistfight—to the death—in the center aisle of St. Peter’s in Rome during a papal high mass. The two men must keep fighting until one of them dies; it’s important to the show. As a side feature, we keep a camera trained on the pope, and every time he falls asleep during the fight, we give the guys an extra hundred dollars. The reason it’s important that one of the two men dies is because the next day, in the same church, we’re going to hold step five: a combination wedding and funeral. The loser of the fight gets the funeral, the winner gets to marry the designated hotel-fuck bride, with the remaining, losing bar and hotel participants serving as bridesmaids and pallbearers. We then give the newlyweds all the leftover drugs from Maniac on Drugs and send them on a honeymoon to some nice, conservative golfing resort on Hilton Head Island, where they are required to take large amounts of drugs and two weeks of golf and tennis lessons. LOOKS AREN’T EVERYTHING This next one is a makeover show. My working title is Try Looking Like That For a Change! You start by picking three incredibly beautiful, successful super-models and then, against their wills, you sedate them, strap them down and subject them to extensive plastic surgery. You give them big, misshapen noses; sagging eye-bags; and plenty of wrinkles and drooping skin on their faces. Then you pump enough fat into their asses, hips and thighs to make them really unhappy. When they come out of the anesthesia, the audience yells, “Try Looking Like That For a Change!” I’m so excited about this one that I’m working on a variation that involves involuntary sex-change surgery. WRAP-UP Well, that’s about it. I suppose all that’s left would be for me to tell you about a show called Bowel Movement. Basically, it’s a show that involves a fixed position camera, a toilet and a series of guys with diets organized primarily around beer and extra-spicy Mexican food. Perhaps it’s better if I don’t go into too much detail at this time. And you know something? This one might actually belong on cable. That’s it, folks. I’ve done all I can to develop a hit show. But the creative process can only go so far; the rest is up to you, the public, and I’m counting on your good taste. WE JUST WANNA WATCH First, let me say that most people take these so-called tragedies like Columbine and Oklahoma City far too seriously. You have to remember, it’s all part of the American way of life. If you live in America you have to go along with these things. You can’t be sitting around whining, “Ohh, a lot of people got killed.” These things happen, folks. People get killed. But concerning the guys (it’s always men) who commit these mass killings—and other less dramatic murders for that matter: After the sentence of death is passed, you will usually see the whining families of the “victims” insist on watching the execution up close, through a little window. They want to see the guy die. Don’t these people know there’s nothing to see? It’s uneventful. An attendant gives the guy an injection; it’s like watching someone get a flu shot. There’s nothing to see. But they often get their wish and are allowed to witness what’s little more than a medical procedure. Now, my feeling is, if you’re going to let people watch some guy get executed, it would make much more sense to put on a little show for these ghouls. Entertain them. Place the guy in a small steel room and send in four or five of these sadistic prison guards with steel pipes and let them beat the guy to death. For about an hour. A constant, uninterrupted, sixty-minute clubbing would seem far more in keeping with our national values. And, of course, this method would be much more satisfying to the families of these so-called victims; these fine, upstanding religious families who believe in a merciful God. They’d enjoy watching these psychotic, animalistic prison guards doing what comes naturally—administering a nice, brutal clubbing. Prison guards who, by the way, dare I say, are also all fine, upstanding religious people as well. Folks, if you’re gonna do these things, don’t settle for halfway measures. Do them right. Do them the Christian way. KEEP AMERICA CLEAN As a public service, next weekend Boy Scouts will be picking up litter and trash from America’s highways and dumping it in America’s rivers. If you’d like to pitch in and help the Boy Scouts, bring some of your own trash from home and throw it out the window of your car as you drive along your favorite road. You’ll be doing your part to keep the highways clean. By the way, if you have any ideas about cleaning up the rivers, let us know. GET THE FUCK OOT I’m tired of these Canadians who have worked in the American news media for years and still haven’t learned to pronounce the words out and about. Peter Jennings is one of them, and there are about three or four more. These people need to be taught that it’s OUTand uh-BOUT, not OOTand uh-BOOT. I say if you can’t learn the language, it’s aboot time you got the fuck oot of here. Besides, Canadians are just disguised English people, and it’s a well-known fact that all English people deserve to die. UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU Things I wonder about the FBI’s list of the “Ten Most Wanted” criminals: When they catch a guy and he comes off the list, does number eleven automatically move up? And does he see it as a promotion? Does he call his criminal friends and say, “I made it, Bruno. I’m finally on the list”? How about when a new, really dangerous guy comes along and they absolutely have to put him at the top of the list without delay? (Call it “Number one with a bullet,” if you wish.) Doesn’t everyone else have to move down a notch? And doesn’t one guy get dropped off? How do they decide which guy to drop? Is it automatically number ten? And how does he feel about that? Does he feel slighted? Does he feel maybe it should’ve been someone else? Has anyone who was demoted ever killed the new guy to gain his spot back? One last question: Does the FBI search harder for number three than they do for number seven? I would. Otherwise why have the numbers at all? These are the kinds of thoughts that keep me from making any real progress in life. TOO MANY PEOPLE There are too many people. Period. There have always been too many people. From the beginning. If these diaper-sniffing Christian babymongers would stop having so many of these cross-eyed little kids, maybe the rest of us would have a chance to spread out and have a little fan. Excess children waste our natural resources. If this society wants me to conserve energy, it had better get some of these child-worshipping religious fanatics to stop having five, six or seven babies. When they do that, I’ll start turning off the lights. And yes, I know the fertility rate is down. Good. It should go down even further. Every family should be allowed half a child. If that. AN L.A. STREET PROBLEM Who are all these guys in their twenties, out on the streets skateboarding at two and three in the afternoon? Get off the streets and find work, motherfucker! And by the way, I’m not talking about X Games guys who are really good at it; that’s different, that’s a way of life. I’m talking about these skateboard fucks who look like they’re actually going somewhere. As if the skateboard were a means of transportation. What the fuck’s the deal with these guys? Same with these Rollerblading and scooter fucks. Why are these fully grown men out on the street, playing with children’s toys during working hours? And wearing helmets, for chrissakes! Jesus, I would be so embarrassed to wear a helmet. Grow up, motherfucker. And, while you’re at it, stay out of the range of my car; I might just decide to run some consumer tests on those helmets. I might also decide to clear the streets of all nonessential traffic. So get a job or play on the sidewalk with the rest of the kids. As Carlin ages, there’s a conflict between his adolescent humor and increasing grumpiness, as shown in the excerpt. The riffs have a high energy level, and one section of the book on euphemisms had me laughing out loud. By the time I finished the book, I tired of the f-word, and the intensity that Carlin brings to everything he says. When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? provides a moderate entertainment, but not much else. Steve Hopkins, April 23, 2005
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	ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the May 2005 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/When Will Jesus.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com