George Carlin always made me laugh and think at the same time. He was a social observer who skewered everybody for their absurdities and hypocrisies. Everybody. When he died on June 22^nd I was in the middle of reading his book “When will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?”. His irreverence is on full throttle offending religion to politics to business to, like I said, everybody. He once said that it is the duty of the comedian to find out where the line was drawn and cross it deliberately. He crosses the line on every page.

The guy who gave us the 7 words you can’t say on TV was actually keeping watch over language as it got softer, more politically correct and inflated with self-importance. He warned us that in the future we will all speak the same language but no one will speak it well.  He said that euphemisms obscure meaning and shade the truth. His death got me thinking about some of the euphemistic language we use in venture capital. He probably would have had a field day with the VC speak we take for granted:

  “crowded space”

 “customer traction”

 “fundable team”

 “scalable model”

 “visibility to an exit”.

 I’m not exactly sure what George would have said as a VC but it would be have been blunt, funny and peppered with f-bombs. He would have offended most entrepreneurs and driven the faint of heart back to their day jobs. George would have been a one man due diligence buzzsaw separating the wheat from the chaff. He even sounded like a hard boiled VC partner prepping for a startup pitch in his rambling poem, A Modern Man:

"I'm a rude dude, but I'm the real deal.

Lean and mean.

Plus every company needs a Board member like George who believed that most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.

George Carlin didn't believe in much but he did create frisbeetarianism , the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

So, rest in peace, George, up on the roof.