"If we could just find out who's in charge, we could kill him"
About this Quote
Carlin’s genius here is how he dresses vigilante rage in the grammar of workplace frustration. “If we could just find out who’s in charge” sounds like the mild complaint of someone stuck on hold with customer service. Then he detonates the sentence with “we could kill him,” exposing how quickly civic disappointment curdles into a fantasy of purified, simple violence.
The specific intent isn’t to propose an assassination-by-committee; it’s to indict a system designed to make accountability feel impossible. Carlin is pointing at the modern political maze where power is dispersed, outsourced, laundered through committees, lobbyists, and corporate boards. In that fog, anger can’t find a target, so it either turns inward (cynicism, resignation) or becomes cartoonishly over-targeted (the desire for one villain you can remove and be done with it). The “we” matters: it implicates the audience in that craving for a single scapegoat, the comforting myth that history has a driver’s seat.
Subtextually, the joke is also about the American appetite for decisive fixes. We love stories where one bad guy gets taken out and the credits roll. Carlin flips that narrative: the very fact you can’t identify “who’s in charge” is the point. The laughter comes from recognition, then discomfort: you’re laughing at a line that reveals how unserious our political language can become when institutions feel rigged and opaque.
Contextually, it fits Carlin’s late-career mistrust of elites and institutions, a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate sensibility sharpened by decades of watching outrage turn into entertainment while the machine keeps humming.
The specific intent isn’t to propose an assassination-by-committee; it’s to indict a system designed to make accountability feel impossible. Carlin is pointing at the modern political maze where power is dispersed, outsourced, laundered through committees, lobbyists, and corporate boards. In that fog, anger can’t find a target, so it either turns inward (cynicism, resignation) or becomes cartoonishly over-targeted (the desire for one villain you can remove and be done with it). The “we” matters: it implicates the audience in that craving for a single scapegoat, the comforting myth that history has a driver’s seat.
Subtextually, the joke is also about the American appetite for decisive fixes. We love stories where one bad guy gets taken out and the credits roll. Carlin flips that narrative: the very fact you can’t identify “who’s in charge” is the point. The laughter comes from recognition, then discomfort: you’re laughing at a line that reveals how unserious our political language can become when institutions feel rigged and opaque.
Contextually, it fits Carlin’s late-career mistrust of elites and institutions, a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate sensibility sharpened by decades of watching outrage turn into entertainment while the machine keeps humming.
Quote Details
| Topic | Dark Humor |
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