Was George Carlin a man of common sense or an idiot?

To my ears, he made a lot of sense, and he wasn’t offensive at all.

He was almost always hilarious, and one reason was there was a large amount of truth in what he said. But he also simplified things to generalities, which means he lost nuance in his “solutions” to social problems. Life is much more complicated than what can be solved by skewering the powerful.

Carlin was a friend and student of Lenny Bruce. He ended up making a career on Lenny’s ruins.
I laugh at his musings, and marvel at his comic skill. He was young once. Check him out here and here

If he was a king’s jester, his head would have been cut off sooner rather than later. But I will run away with that head forcing it to stay on yacking so I can have a life laughing!

I love his comedy. His observations on everyday living were great.

I can understand him being “offensive” to some; humor is always going to be offensive to someone, even if only to the guy who slips on the banana peel or the person being poked fun at… if he has no sense of humor or proportion or humility. Carlin had all of those things, in spades. I don’t know about “common sense”, since I never saw him in everyday life. But he was a genius. In no way was he “an idiot”. Only an idiot would think so.

Pretty funny guy. Good comedian.
I know nothing about being a professional comedian. But I don’t think it has anything to do with either common sense, or idiocy.

It has a lot to do with understanding what people are thinking about, and presenting it (these days anyway) with an irreverent twist.
A true communications art form if you will.
He was good at it. Plus he was able to be profane in a sort of innocent fashion that never truly upset anybody, which is quite an accomplishment if you think about it.

My dad him, back when he had short hair and wore button down shirts and a tie.

George Carlin was hilarious to me.

He was only funny and smart (to me), so I really have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you give some examples of him being moronic or not making sense?

He was a genius. Very few people can reliably offend absolutely everyone about something!

In comedy I have noticed that a bomb is bad….bad, bad, bad. The jokes have to be funny and to do this with regularity many factual details have to be contrived or just left out of a lead in to stay on track to avoid “the bomb”. It all revolves around the punch outcome so if all the bits and pieces ( we’ll call them facts) are left out or marginalized it will leave enough room for the punch to be effective, we all laugh then. If Bill Maher bothered to give all the angles( again those pesky facts) we all would be left scratching our heads when the punch came….boom. It wouldn’t really be comedy worth a crap- just a MSNBC commentary.
George Carlin was one of my favorites

I’m gonna go with ‘genius’, too. His goal wasn’t just to make us laugh, it was to make us think.

Genius. I doubt he truly believed in a lot of the more outlandish statements he sometimes made—they were part of his act. He was trying to make us think.