And this stuff will be on every single newscast day and night for a week. There’ll be special one-hour salutes on “Good Morning America,” the “Today” show, and “CBS This Morning.” Ted Koppel will ask Henry Kissinger if it’s true Bob Hope actually shortened some of our wars by telling jokes close to the frontlines. CNN will do a series of expanded “Show Biz Todays.” One of the cable channels will do a one-week marathon of his movies. And it goes without saying that NBC will put together a three-hour, prime-time special called “Thanks for the Memories,” but at the last minute they’ll realize Bob Hope’s audience skews older, and sell it to CBS.

Then there’ll be the funeral, carried live on the Dead Celebrity Channel, with thousands of grotesque acne-ridden fans seeking autographs from all the show-business clowns who dug out their best black golfing outfits to attend “one of the hottest burials to hit this town in decades”—Variety.

And all this shit will go on for weeks and weeks and weeks. Until Milton Berle dies. And then it will start all over again. I dare not even contemplate Frank Sinatra and Ronald Reagan.

brain droppings KEEP IT—WE DOnT WAnT IT

Don’t you get tired of celebrities who explain their charity work by aying they feel they have to”give something back.” I don’t feel that way. I didn’t take nothin’. You can search my house; I didn’t take a thing. Everything I got, I worked for, and it was given to me freely. I also paid taxes on it. Late! I paid late. But I paid. You celebrity people wanna give something back? How about giving back half the money? Or a couple of those houses? And you dickwads who collect cars? How about giving back 50 or 60 of them? Or maybe, if you people really want to give something back, you could let go of a little of that arrogance.

For my part, I like to work quietly in the background, helping my preferred charities raise money. If you’d like to help too, here are just a few you might consider. X St. Anthony’s Shelter for the Recently All Right X The Christian Haven for the Chronically Feisty X The Committee to Keep Something-or-Other from Taking Place X The Center for Research into the Heebie Jeebies X Free Hats for Fat People X The Task Force for Better Pancakes X The Home for the Visually Unpleasant X The State Hospital for Those Who Felt All Right About a Year Ago

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C A R L I N CEO R C E X The Committee to Challenge the Height Requirements of Mailmen X The Beverly Hills Chamber of Poor Taste X The Alliance of People Who Don’t Know What’s Next X The Downtown Mission for the Permanently Disheveled X The Malibu Home for the Unimportant X The Nook for Needy Nuns X Children of Parents with Bad Teeth X The Rochester Home for Soreheads X The League of People Who Should Know Better X Hors d’Oeuvres for Bangladesh X The Brotherhood of Real Creeps X The Committee to Remove the “Bah” from “Sis Boom Bah” X A stranger on the train who wants to tell me about his bowel movements. X People who whistle cowboy songs during a funeral. X Anyone who refers to Charles Manson as “Chuck.” X A tall man with a Slavic accent wearing a bow tie of human flesh- 126

brain droppings X Any couple who owns “his and hers” rectal thermometers. ^t A girl whose wallet contains nude photos of Sam Donaldson or Yassir Arafat. X A man with a tattoo that shows Joey Buttafuco dancing the Lambada with Leona Helmsley. X Any man who can ingest a quart of vegetable soup through his nose in one long suck. X A priest with an eye patch and a limp who’s selling pieces of the cross. X Any guy named Dogmeat whose body has over six square feet of scar tissue. X Anyone who takes off work on Ted Bundy’s birthday. X A man with gold front teeth who wants to play stud poker on the floor of the bus station men’s room. X A crying woman with a harpoon gun entering a sports bar. X Anyone who gets plastic surgery in an attempt to look more intelligent. X A man with one cloven hoof who wants to give my daughter a hysterectomy. X A seventy-year-old man wearing gag underpants that say “We visited the Grassy Knoll.” X Any man with a birthmark shaped like a hypodermic needle. X Any woman who repeatedly gives me a high five during sex. X A cross-eyed man in a New Year’s hat reciting “Casey at the Bat” in Latin.

- ?**&.? ?

GEORGE CARL1N

brain droppings

Anyone who receives e-mail from Willard Scott.

A man who plunges a bone-handled carving fork through hi neck in order to get my attention.

Anyone with three nostrils.

A bag lady wearing over 200 garments, including nine separate hats

Any man who tries to pierce his ear with an electric can opener.

A retarded twelve-year-old who carries more than six books of matches.

Any man who gives himself a Harvey Wallbanger enema. On the rocks.

Any person bleeding from three orifices who wants me to cosign on a loan.

A homely, flat-chested woman wearing a Foxy Lady T-shirt. SPACED OUT

You know something I could really do without? The Space Shuttle. Why don’t these people go out and get real jobs? It’s the same shit over and over. They get delayed, they blast off, they get in orbit, something breaks, they fix it, the President says hello, Mission Control wakes them up with a song no one has listened to in twenty years, the science experiment placed on board by the third-graders of Frog Balls, Tennessee, is a big success, and bla bla bla. It’s time to end this shit. Besides, it’s irresponsible. The last thing we should be doing is sending our grotesquely distorted DNA out into space. 128

IN THE PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN HOME. AS opposed to what? The privacy of someone else’s home? You have no privacy in someone else’s home; that’s why you got your own home.

DOWN THE PIKE. “He was the meanest guy ever to come down the pike.” Fine. What about guys who come up the pike? Not everyone lives “north of the pike.” Some guys have to come up the pike, and they’re really mean, because nobody mentions them at all. And what about a guy who doesn’t even use the pike? He arrives on Amtrak! “Boy, he was the meanest guy ever to arrive on Amtrak.” Doesn’t sound right.

LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL We say some guy was “goin’ like a bat outta Hell.” How do we know how fast a bat would leave Hell? Maybe he would leave real slow. In fact, why should we assume that a bat would even want to leave Hell? Maybe he likes it there. Maybe Hell is just right for a bat. Maybe it’s bat heaven. And now that we’re on this subject, how do we know Hell has bats in the first place? What would a bat be doin’ in Hell? Usually a bat is in the belfry. Why would he want to split his time between two places? Then again, maybe that’s why he’s in such a hurry to leave Hell. He’s due back at the belfry.

Why do we say OUT LIKE A LIGHT? The primary function of a light is to be lit, not to be out. Why choose a light to represent the concept of being out? Why not, “On like a light?” The same is true of DROPPING LIKE FLIES; the wrong quality is being emphasized. Flies are known for flying, not dropping. And let’s forget METEORIC RISE. Meteors don’t rise, they fall.

C E 0 R C E C A R L I N YOU CAN TALK UNTIL YOU’RE BLUE IN THE FACE, ETC. ETC. Well, yOu (i, can’t talk until you’re blue in the face. In order to talk, you need oxygen. Blueness of the face is caused by a lack of oxygen. So if you’re blue in the face, you probably stopped talking a long time ago. You might be making some gestures. In fact, if you’re ^| running out of oxygen, I would imagine you’re making quite a number of gestures. And rather flamboyant ones at that. L. When we point out someone’s lack of popularity, especial- : ^ . * ly a politician’s, we sometimes say, HE COULDN’T GET ELECTED DOC „>?,;?, CATCHER. First of all, since when do they elect dog catchers? I’ve ; ; never seen one on the ballot, have you? The last time you were in the voting booth, did it say, “President, Vice President, Dog Catcher?” No. And why do they imply that getting elected dog <J catcher would be easy? I think it would be hard. A lot of peo- ?.,; pie have dogs; they wouldn’t vote for you. And many of the ,; ….;. ., people who don’t have dogs still like them. I should think it would be quite difficult to get elected dog catcher. ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER. Not always. Sometimes one … thing leads to the same thing. Ask an addict. l§ THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD needs to be updated. It’s overdue. It should have been changed much earlier in the twentieth century to, “The typewriter is mightier than the machine gun.” But at this point is should probably read, “The …., j* word processor is mightier than the particle-beam weapon.” UNIDENTIFIED PERSON. What exactly is an “unidentified person”? Doesn’t everyone have an identity? Maybe they mean .,…; he’s a person they can’t identify. But that would make him an “unidentifiable person.” I guess if nothing else, he could always be referred to as “that guy we can’t identify.”