Vulgar? Hmmmmm. I never saw it that way. Carlin was booked in all the right places long before his 'seven words you can't say on radio' bit. He was never slapstick like Jery Lewis, never as caustic as Shelly Berman. His closest peer IMO would have been Bob Newhart and his telephone conversations. You couldn't do vulgar anywhwere outside of Vegas in the mid 60s, and even in Vegas it had to be for some reason other than just the defiance of norms.
Taste is taste, but much of his work was centered on his extenisve study and understanding of language. Every disc jockey wanabee (count me in that group) in the 60's could do recite Carlin's "W- I- N- O, wonderful Wino, with Al Sleet the hippy dippy weatherman" -- it's going to get very dark this evening, then sometime around 6 am it will start to lighten up -- or his rip on the predecessor to Extreme Makever, Queen for a Day. Or his observation that 'white' language was being supplanted by 'black' language; "put a bunch of black boys in a white Catholic high school -- three weeks later you don't hear the black kids saying something like, "Hey, what do you think about Friday night, can we beat St. Al's? Instead it's the white boys saying, hey, Bro, he got a funky jump shot."
He was always keenly aware of irony and duplicity in society and to me, aways made the connection between mind and heart.
