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George Carlin was a pioneer of observational comedy, developing popular characters in the 1960s. He rebelled against mainstream TV standards and became a counterculture icon, famously performing “Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television.” He hosted the premiere of Saturday Night Live and had a successful career in live concerts, books, and TV shows. Carlin was a critic of organized religion and conservative politics. He received the Mark Twain Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, but died of cardiac arrest shortly after. His ashes were scattered in an unknown location, per his last will.
George Carlin (1937-2008) pioneered the modern genre of observational comedy, alongside contemporaries such as Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Mort Sahl. George Carlin began his comedy career as a disc jockey in the late 1950s, often teaming with fellow comedian Jack Burns. The Burns-Carlin comedy team disbanded during the early 1960s, but Carlin developed many of its most popular characters, including an unsuspecting “Wonderful WINO” disc jockey and Al Sleet, the “hippy-dippy weatherman,” during those formative years.
Stand-up comedians who hoped to appear regularly on television during the first half of the 1960s were generally required to present a clean image and to limit the scope of their routine to conventional subject matter. At first, George Carlin conformed to these television standards, but eventually found performing generic routines and modified cars for mainstream America to be intellectually and artistically stifling. In the late 1960s, George Carlin changed his public persona to that of a counterculture hipster with long flowing hair and a bushy beard.
One of George Carlin’s favorite sources of material was the English language, and this fascination with words led to the development of one of his most infamous and controversial routines. Carlin noted that the FCC specifically banned seven obscene words from public broadcasts, and in his routine he wondered how one handful of words gained so much power over society. His routine “Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television” included all seven banned words, along with graphic comments about whether or not those words should be on the FCC’s list.
Although the routine is more an indictment of arbitrary censorship than an extended “dirty joke,” Carlin was arrested for indecency after performing the routine at a concert. A radio station broadcasting the routine was also fined for violating the FCC’s rules of decency, a case that reached the US Supreme Court.
George Carlin hosted the premiere of a late night sketch comedy show on NBC called Saturday Night Live, although his duties were limited to introducing musical acts and performing stand-up routines between sketches. Carlin’s primary outlets for comedy were live concerts taped for the HBO cable network, along with a heavy touring schedule driven largely by financial troubles with the IRS.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Carlin wrote a popular series of books that supplemented his HBO concert appearances and occasional tours. He has also appeared in his own television series of the same name on the FOX network and performed as the host on the American version of Thomas the Tank Engine. When the producers of Pixar’s animated film Cars needed a voice for Volkswagen’s hippie microbus called the Fillmore, they turned to George Carlin.
Carlin’s later routines were often punctuated with darker observations of the human condition, along with highly controversial references to religion, politics and sex. Though raised Irish Catholic, Carlin was strongly opposed to many of the trappings associated with organized religion, viewing believers in God as intellectually suspect. Politically liberal, Carlin has also been an outspoken critic of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars and the conservative, militaristic mindset that allowed them to happen.
In 2008, George Carlin was selected to receive the Mark Twain Lifetime Achievement Award for his pioneering work in American stand-up comedy. Several days after this honor was announced, however, Carlin entered the hospital complaining of chest pains and died of cardiac arrest that same afternoon. In accordance with his last will, his cremated ashes were scattered in an unknown location and no public funeral or commemoration was held. George Carlin was 71 years old.
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