"You have to be asleep to believe it"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q

Above, dare I say is one of the greatest speeches in history. No, it is not a “Yes You Can” speech by Obama or an “I am an African” speech by Thabo Mbeki. For our second last blog my lecture asked us to find rhetoric strategies in people’s speeches. I was tempted to choose a speech by a politician, but than I wondered if comedians too use rhetoric strategies in their speech. 

George Carlin was not only a comedian. He was also a social critic, satirist, actor writer. His jokes did not always make everybody laugh, but he knew how to make people listen to him and he also made his audience question everything around them and he did this by using rhetoric strategies.

 In this clip one sees that the first strategy he uses is the “Us vs. Them”. Carlin tells his audience that it is them against their government. He paints these images of politicians who don’t care about the citizens, but just want money and power.  One can see this clearly in his comment: “You don’t, you have no choice. You have owners they own you…” His use of the words “You and I” also help to draw in his audience. By using those words he tells them that he is also a victim in this system and that he shares the same troubles as them. However, one could see this as Righteous indignation. Carlin is very opinionated and one could even say biased. He focuses on the one side of the picture. He labels all politicians as bad and makes bold statements without any proof. Ah, and then comes the “Pacing” where Carlin uses words like “surely” in his speech. However, one must ask how sure he of his facts is, but he does this in such a clever way that the listener is so taken by what his saying and they reason the listener is, is because of his use of humor. Well Carlin was a comedian so his use of humor was inevitable. His straight forwardness and use of foul language always got his audience laughing. One sees it clearly in this video, every time he uses the “F” word the audience laughs.

Believe it or not, but Carlin also uses emotional language, One sees this when he talks about “good honest hardworking people”. His tone changes and he narrows his eyes slightly to add on to this use of rhetoric strategy. He assimilates the use of emotional words with another rhetoric strategy called “Absolute Certainty”. He asserts that he knows something with absolute certainty when he says: “They don’t give a [damn] about you!” This is really only based on self-evidence.

However, there is some truth in Carlin’s speech. He speaks the language of the audience. He has a way of injecting many emotions into his audience just by his clever use of language and body language. Well may I went a bit over board by calling this the greatest speech of all time, but Carlin’s words may not be as famous as the politicians I’ve just mentioned but they are as dangerous. Who knows Carlin might have started a revolution, maybe Americans have woken up from this American dream.