Eventually, Carlin changed both his routines and his appearance. He lost some TV bookings by dressing strangely for a comedian of the time, wearing faded jeans and sporting a beard and earrings at a time when clean-cut, well-dressed comedians were the norm. Using his own persona as a springboard for his new comedy, he was presented by Ed Sullivan in a performance of “The Hair Piece,” and quickly regained his popularity as the public caught on to his sense of style.

In this period he also perfected what is perhaps his best-known routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”, recorded on Class Clown. Carlin was arrested on July 21, 1972 at Milwaukee’s Summerfest and charged with violating obscenity laws after performing this routine. The case, which prompted Carlin to refer to the words for a time as, “The Milwaukee Seven”, was dismissed in December of that year; the judge declared the language indecent, stating that the language was indecent but cited free speech, as well as the lack of any disturbance. In 1973, a man complained to the FCC that his son had heard a later, similar routine, “Filthy Words”, from Occupation: Foole, broadcast one afternoon over WBAI, a Pacifica Foundation FM radio station in New York City. Pacifica received a citation from the FCC, which sought to fine Pacifica for allegedly violating FCC regulations which prohibited broadcasting “obscene” material. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the FCC action, by a vote of 5 to 4, ruling that the routine was “indecent but not obscene”, and the FCC had authority to prohibit such broadcasts during hours when children were likely to be among the audience. F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978). The court documents contain a complete transcript of the routine.

The controversy only increased Carlin’s fame (or notoriety). Carlin eventually expanded the dirty-words theme with a seemingly interminable end to a performance (ending with his voice fading out in one HBO version, and accompanying the credits in the Carlin at Carnegie special for the 1982-83 season), and a set of 49 web pages organized by subject and embracing his “Incomplete List Of Impolite Words”.

Carlin was the first-ever host of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, debuting on October 11, 1975. (He also hosted SNL on November 10, 1984, where he actually appeared in sketches. The first time he hosted, he only appeared to perform stand-up and introduce the guest acts.) The following season, 1976-77, Carlin also appeared regularly on CBS Television’s Tony Orlando & Dawn variety series.

Carlin unexpectedly stopped performing regularly in 1976, when his career appeared to be at its height. For the next five years, he rarely appeared to perform stand-up, although it was at this time he began doing specials for HBO as part of its On Location series. His first two HBO specials aired in 1977 and 1978. It was later revealed that Carlin had suffered the first of his three non-fatal heart attacks during this layoff period.

George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008) was an American stand-up comedian, actor and author who won four Grammy Awards for his comedy albums.

Carlin was especially noted for his political and black humor and his observations on language, psychology, and religion along with many taboo subjects. Carlin and his “Seven Dirty Words” comedy routine were central to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, in which a narrow 5-4 decision by the justices affirmed the government’s right to regulate “indecent” material on the public airwaves.

In the 2000s, Carlin’s stand-up routines focused on the flaws in modern-day America. He often took on contemporary political issues in the United States and satirized the excesses of American culture.

He placed second on the Comedy Central cable television network list of the 10 greatest stand-up comedians, ahead of Lenny Bruce and behind Richard Pryor. He was a frequent performer and guest host on The Tonight Show during the three-decade Johnny Carson era, and was also the first person to host Saturday Night Live.

George Carlin was born in New York City, the son of Mary (née Bearey), a secretary, and Patrick Carlin, a national advertising manager for the New York Sun. Carlin was of Irish descent and was raised in the Roman Catholic faith.

Carlin grew up on West 121st Street, in a neighborhood of Manhattan which he later said, in a stand-up routine, he and his friends called “White Harlem”, because that sounded a lot tougher than its real name of Morningside Heights. He was raised by his mother, who left his father when Carlin was two years old. After 3 semesters, at the age of 14, Carlin involuntarily left Cardinal Hayes High School and briefly attended Bishop Dubois High School in Harlem. He later joined the United States Air Force, training as a radar technician. He was stationed at Barksdale AFB in Bossier City, Louisiana.

During this time he began working as a disc jockey on KJOE, a radio station based in the nearby city of Shreveport. He did not complete his Air Force enlistment. Labeled an “unproductive airman” by his superiors, Carlin was discharged on July 29, 1957. In 1959, Carlin and Jack Burns began as a comedy team when both were working for radio station KXOL in Fort Worth, Texas. After successful performances at Fort Worth’s beat coffeehouse, The Cellar, Burns and Carlin headed for California in February 1960 and stayed together for two years as a team before moving on to individual pursuits.

Carlin’s Website

Carlin on IMDB

Carlin quotes page

Carlin on YouTube

Time article

In the 1960s, Carlin began appearing on television variety shows, notably The Ed Sullivan Show. His most famous routines were:

• The Indian Sergeant (“You wit’ the beads… get outta line”)
• Stupid disc jockeys (“Wonderful WINO…”) — “The Beatles’ latest record, when played backwards at slow speed, says ‘Dummy! You’re playing it backwards at slow speed!’”
• Al Sleet, the “hippie-dippie weatherman” — “Tonight’s forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning.”
• Jon Carson — the “world never known, and never to be known”

Variations on the first three of these routines appear on Carlin’s 1967 debut album, Take Offs and Put Ons, recorded live in 1966 at The Roostertail in Detroit, Michigan.

During this period, Carlin became more popular as a frequent performer and guest host on The Tonight Show during the Johnny Carson era, becoming one of Carson’s most frequent substitutes during the host’s three-decade reign. Carlin was also cast on Away We Go, a 1967 comedy show. His material during his early career, which included impressions, and his appearance, which consisted of suits and short-cropped hair, has been seen as “conventional”, particularly when contrasted with his later antiestablishment material.

Carlin was present at Lenny Bruce’s arrest for obscenity. According to legend the police began attempting to detain members of the audience for questioning, and asked Carlin for his identification. Telling the police he did not believe in government issued IDs, he was arrested and taken to jail with Bruce in the same vehicle.

In 2001, Carlin was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 15th Annual American Comedy Awards.

In December 2003, California U.S. Representative Doug Ose introduced a bill (H.R. 3687) to outlaw the broadcast of Carlin’s seven “dirty words”, including “compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms)”. (The bill omits “tits”, but includes “ass” and “asshole”, which were not part of Carlin’s original routine.)

The following year, Carlin was fired from his headlining position at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas after an altercation with his audience. After a poorly received set filled with dark references to suicide bombings and beheadings, Carlin stated that he could not wait to get out of “this fucking hotel” and Las Vegas in general, claiming he wanted to go back East “where the real people are”. He continued to insult his audience, stating:

“People who go to Las Vegas, you’ve got to question their fucking intellect to start with. Traveling hundreds and thousands of miles to essentially give your money to a large corporation is kind of fucking moronic. That’s what I’m always getting here is these kind of fucking people with very limited intellects.”

An audience member shouted back that Carlin should “stop degrading us”, at which point Carlin responded “Thank you very much, whatever that was. I hope it was positive; if not, well blow me.” He was immediately fired by MGM Grand and soon after announced he would enter rehab for drug and alcohol addiction.

For years, Carlin had performed regularly as a headliner in Las Vegas. He began a tour through the first half of 2006, and had a new HBO Special on November 5, 2005 entitled Life is Worth Losing, which was shown live from the Beacon Theatre in New York City. Topics covered included suicide, natural disasters (and the impulse to see them escalate in severity), cannibalism, genocide, human sacrifice, threats to civil liberties in America, and how an argument can be made that humans are inferior to animals.

On February 1, 2006, Carlin mentioned to the crowd, during his Life is Worth Losing set at the Tachi Palace Casino in Lemoore, California, that he had been discharged from the hospital only six weeks previously for “heart failure” and “pneumonia”, citing the appearance as his “first show back”.

Carlin provided the voice of Fillmore, a character in the Disney/Pixar animated feature Cars, which opened in theaters on June 9, 2006. The character Fillmore, who is presented as an antiestablishment hippie, is a VW Microbus with a psychedelic paint job, whose front license plate reads “51237” — Carlin’s birthday.

Carlin’s last HBO stand-up special, It’s Bad for Ya, aired live on March 1, 2008 in Santa Rosa, CA at the Wells Fargo Center For The Arts. Many of the themes that appeared in this HBO special included “American Bullshit”, “Rights”, “Death”, “Old Age”, and “Child Rearing”. Carlin had been working the new material for this HBO special for several months prior in concerts all over the country.

On June 18, 2008, four days before his death, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC announced that Carlin would be the 2008 honoree of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor to be awarded in November of that year.

In 1981, Carlin returned to the stage, releasing A Place For My Stuff, and he returned to HBO and New York City with the Carlin at Carnegie TV special, videotaped at Carnegie Hall and airing during the 1982-83 season. Carlin continued doing HBO specials every year or every other year over the following decade-and-a-half. All of Carlin’s albums from this time forward are the HBO specials.

Carlin’s acting career was primed with a major supporting role in the 1987 comedy hit Outrageous Fortune, starring Bette Midler and Shelley Long; it was his first notable screen role after a handful of previous guest roles on television series. Playing drifter Frank Madras, the role poked fun at the lingering effect of the 1960s psychedelic counterculture. In 1989, he gained popularity with a new generation of teens when he was cast as Rufus, the time-traveling mentor of the titular characters in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and reprised his role in the film sequel Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey as well as the first season of the cartoon series. In 1991, he provided the narrative voice for the American version of the children’s show Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, a role he continued until 1998. He played “Mr. Conductor” on the PBS children’s show Shining Time Station which featured Thomas from 1991 to 1993 as well as Shining Time Station TV specials in 1995 and Mr. Conductor’s Thomas Tales in 1996. Also in 1991, Carlin had a major supporting role in the movie The Prince of Tides along with Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand.

Carlin began a weekly Fox Broadcasting sitcom, The George Carlin Show, in 1993, playing New York City cab driver “George O’Grady”. He quickly included a variation of the “Seven Words” in the plot. The show ran 27 episodes through December 1995.

In 1997, his first hardcover book, Brain Droppings, was published, and sold over 750,000 copies as of 2001. Carlin was honored at the 1997 Aspen Comedy Festival with a retrospective George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy hosted by Jon Stewart.

In 1999, Carlin played a supporting role as a satirically marketing-oriented Roman Catholic cardinal in filmmaker Kevin Smith’s movie Dogma. He worked with Smith again with a cameo appearance in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and later played an atypically serious role in Jersey Girl, as the blue collar father of Ben Affleck’s character.

The world will be less interesting without this man in it.