Song information On this page you can find the lyrics of the song Pyramid of the Hopeless, artist - George Carlin. Album song Life Is Worth Losing, in the genre
Date of issue: 31.03.2006
Age restrictions: 18+
Record label: Laugh.com
Song language: English
Pyramid of the Hopeless |
But say what you want about American folks. |
Yeah. |
You can say what you want about Americans. |
You can call them smart. |
Dumb. |
Ignorant, innocent, naive, gullible, easily led. |
Whatever you want. |
You’re gonna have to deal with them. |
You’re gonna have to deal with them because you’re in the television business now. |
You got the All-Suicide Channel on cable TV. |
You need these people as viewers. |
You need people looking in. You got to worry about your ratings. |
You’re going to have to be thinking about sweeps months. |
Most folks know what sweeps months are now. |
Those are the more important ratings months of the year when they put on all their biggest attractions and their hottest stars trying to pump the ratings up a little bit, get the local stations to adjust their advertising rates. |
You’re going to have to compete with the mentality of network television. |
And I think on an All- Suicide Channel. |
During sweeps months, you’re going to have to go with mass suicides. |
Big public events where hundreds of people kill themselves all at the same time right on live TV. |
Now, I’ve been wrestling with a way to do this. |
I’ve been trying to figure this out. |
I swear to God this is the truth. |
I’ve been trying to figure this part of it out for six months now. |
And I only recently have it so I’m going to tell you about it. |
Now, we’re going to have to get lots and lots of people to kill themselves on demand. |
How are we going to do this? |
That’s the question. |
How are we going to get large numbers of people to commit suicide at a time and place of our choosing? |
And I mean large numbers, because don’t forget besides sweeps, we’re going to have to be thinking about 24-hour a day programming. |
So to make this work. |
We need organization. |
You need a system. |
You can’t just sit around the studio all day long and wait for people to drop by and commit suicide. |
What we have to do is build up a large pool of hopeless people. |
Suicide volunteers. |
People with no hope. |
People whom society has given up on. |
Fate has given up on or who have given up on themselves. |
Rock bottom. |
Dead end. |
Totally fucked-up people with no hope and no reason to live. |
Now we got our share of them. |
Folks. |
Think of it as a pyramid. |
That will give you a visual fix on it. |
Think of it as a pyramid. |
The pyramid of the hopeless. |
We are going to start building this pyramid at the very base, naturally. |
And the bottom layer is going to be homeless people. |
God knows we’ve got plenty of them. |
Nobody gives a fuck about them. |
Nobody’s got a plan. |
Nobody’s got any money. |
Nobody’s got a program. |
Nobody gives a fuck about homeless people. |
We don’t know how many we have even. |
We know 500.000 of them are veterans. |
Because we’re so good to the veterans in this country. |
And we know about a 1.400.000 of them are children. |
There, so we got a million and a half children. |
And then God knows how many more we got. |
Totally fucking hopeless – [fart sound] – in the pyramid they go! |
Now, the next group we are going to put in here, these are the people in prison with these long sentences they’ve been given. |
Many of them deserved. |
I’ll grant you that. |
I’m sure half the people in prison are in there for things they really did. |
That’s not a bad average. |
One out of two. |
But nobody gives a shit about these people. |
Nobody’s going to hire them if they do get out. |
They’re never going to get out. |
Rehabilitation doesn’t work. |
And the judges give them these fucking draconian sentences. |
40. 50. 60. 70. 80. 100 year sentences. |
Life term. |
Double life. |
One guy about a month ago was given three consecutive life terms. |
Plus two death penalties. |
How the fuck do you serve that? |
Even David Copperfield can’t do that shit. |
In order to do that. |
You’d have to be a Hindu. |
Then you got the people on death row. |
They ain’t going anywhere – [fart sound] – In the fucking pyramid they go! |
Now, the next layer, this group is self-selected. |
Self-selected and a bit controversial to some ears, I guess. |
These are the people who claim to be depressed, okay? |
Apparently in this land of plenty, this richest nation in the history world we’re so proud of saying that. |
Some supermarkets have a hundred thousand items in them. |
We have 19 million Americans claiming to be depressed. |
And some of them take medicine for it. |
Sometimes the medicine makes one of them commit suicide and that depresses the shit out of the rest of them. |
Then you have these people who only think they’re depressed. |
They think they’re depressed because they saw the commercial on TV and the doctor looked like a good guy, the music sounded kind of peppy and what the fuck, some of these pills will probably just pick me right up. |
Totally fucking hopeless mindset – [fart sound] – In the fucking pyramid! |
Up at the very top we are gonna put the people who are truly sick. |
The terminally ill. |
Unfortunately, no hope for a lot of them. |
Hundreds of thousands of them. |
There’s no cure for what they have. |
Some of them say there is no cure because nobody’s looking for one. |
There ain’t enough people sick with it so there ain’t no money in the fucking cure. |
Then there’s people who’ve got… there’s a cure, but they don’t have the money for it. |
There are the other ones there’s a cure but they’re too far gone. |
There’s other ones there’s a cure but there is no social means to get to it. |
So these people ain’t going anywhere. |
They should be allowed to commit suicide. |
Boom. |
In the fucking pyramid they go. |
Now, think of what you got here, folks. |
Think of yourself as the executive vice president of programming at the All-Suicide Channel. |
Think of what you have to work with in the pyramid of the hopeless. |
You have homeless. |
Imprisoned, condemned, depressed and terminally ill people. |
And I’m going to bet you anything. |
In this depraved culture of ours. |
Bet you anything, with the reality show mentality we have on the All-Suicide Channel. |
You could get 500 of these hopeless people to hold hands and jump into the Grand Canyon. |
I’ll fucking bet you. |
I’ll fucking bet you you can get that done in this country, write this down. |
I’ll bet you. |
For money, for money, for money. |
You got to give them something. |
You know, you got to… Oh, Shit, they’re Americans, they’re for sale. |
Give them a little something. |
Americans will do anything but you got to give them a toaster, don’t you? |
Give them a little prize of some kind. |
Everybody wants a gizmo. |
Give them a gizmo. |
Give them a cell phone. |
Give them a laptop. |
Give them a cell phone that takes a picture of a laptop. |
Give them a laptop that takes a picture of a cell phone. |
Give them one of them three-wheeled vehicles. |
Give them an all-terrain vehicle. |
Give them one of them riding lawnmowers. |
Give them a snowblower. |
Give them an outdoor barbecuer or a jet-ski. |
Give them one of those things they buy for themselves when they are trying to take their minds off how badly they’re getting fucked by the system. |
I know what you do. |
Just before these people jump, you give them a hat with a camera in it. |
And you tell them it’s jump cam. |
Tell them you’ll send the video home to the family. |
T-Shirt. |
Who don’t want a T-shirt? |
Everybody does. |
Give them a nice T-shirt. |
“I committed suicide and all I got was this stupid, fucking T-shirt!” |
All right. |
Now… If you want to really raise the profile of this promotion, get some of those evangelical Christians to volunteer for it and you call it, “Jump for Jesus”. |
“Jump for Jesus”. |
They would bite. |
They would go for it. |
Hey, you got to be fair. |
Got to be fair about these Christians. |
They come in for a lot of abuse these days. |
So you do have to be fair. |
All a Christian really wants out of life is to die. |
And go see Jesus. |
Give them a helping hand. |
Do the Christian thing. |
Tell them it’s a shortcut to heaven. |
Mention the word martyr. |
It works on the Muslims. |
It works on the Catholics. |
It might work for these folks, you never know. |
Hey, hey, I know. |
Give them a little encouragement. |
“Go on you fanatical fuck, he’s down there. |
He’s down there. |
He’s down there. |
He’s at the bottom of the canyon. |
Look for the man with the glowing head.” |
Oh, you could have a lot of fun with a channel like that. |
But you know something, folks, maybe you don’t want to be on cable. |
Maybe you don’t want to be on cable. |
It is a limited audience. |
You might want to widen out and get more people looking in and you’re going to have to go to the broadcast networks. |
One of the big broadcast networks. |
And I don’t know about you, but when I think about suicide and broadcast network television. |
I’m thinking FOX. |
Huh? |
I’m telling you FOX. |
If the people at FOX ain’t sitting around having meetings on an idea like this. |
They ain’t doing their god damn jobs over there. |
So you put this thing on FOX, get Budweiser to sponsor it. |
Budweiser and a whole bunch of car companies so people can be thinking about drinking and driving at the same time. |
Ain’t that fun? |
Isn’t it fun to watch the sporting events on American television? |
“Drink this! |
Drive that! |
Fuck you!” |
They don’t care. |
They don’t give a shit about you. |
And then every now and then they qualify the whole message. |
“Drink responsibly.” |
[long fart sound] So you put this thing on FOX. |
And if you do, if you do or on any broadcast network, you’re gonna have to bring in that younger audience. |
Everybody knows that. |
That’s what the advertisers are looking for is these 18 to 24 year olds. |
You’re going to have to get young people interested in this. |
You know how you get young people interested in suicide? |
You don’t call it suicide. |
You call it “Extreme Living”. |