Make Em Laugh

An interview George Carlin recorded for public-service broadcasters in the US

More George Carlin videos

George Carlin was born and raised in New York.,dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Air Force as a radar technician, during which time he started working as a radio disc jockey, off base.

He began his comedy career in in the late Fifties, with a conventional act that revolved around wordplay and reminiscences of his working-class upbringing in New York. He teamed up with Jack Burns, and played the conservative nightclub circuit for a couple of years

But in 1962 Carlin saw Lenny Bruce get arrested for a drug joke in Chicago. The encounter made an impact on Carlin. Toward the end of the decade, he grew his hair, ditched his suits and worked on a harder-hitting, more honest routine with references to drugs and sex.

There was a backlash from the lucrative nightclub circuit he had been working, and bookings dried up.

But he quickly found new fans in among youngsters, and started play colleges and ‘counterculture’ coffee houses, which allowed him to rebuild his career. His second album, FM & AM, released in 1972, had older material on the AM side with bolder, routines on the FM side.

He later said: ‘I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn’t really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of ten years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people.’

In 1972, he also recorded the routine for which he became most famous – the controversial Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television He was arrested for obscenity for performing it in 1972, On July 21, 1972, at Milwaukee's Summerfest, but the case was dismissed.

Its later airing on a New York radio station in the middle of the afternoon led to a groundbreaking US Supreme Court case in 1978, which led to a nationwide 10pm watershed for indecent material. Of the case, Carlin said: ‘My name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of.’

Carlin was the first ever host of Saturday Night Live, in 1975, and over his long career recorded 23 albums of stand-up, 14 HBO specials and made 130 appearances on The Tonight Show, as well as writing three books of humorous observations.

Drug addiction, particularly cocaine, plagued him for much of his life; and in the Eighties, Carlin survived a heart attack, two open-heart surgeries and serious tax problems.

In the Nineties he branched into acting, appearing in the Barbra Streisand movie Prince of Tides, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Dogma. He even provided the voiceover for Thomas The Tank Engine in the US.

In 2004, Comedy Central named him the second best stand-up comedian of all time, behind Richard Pryor. But at the end of the year he had to take two months off touring to go into rehab for his addictions to Vicodin and red wine.

And in 2008 it was announced that he would be awarded t the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, but he died the week after it the news broke, of heart failure. He had been working just a week before his death, at the age of 71.

A true icon of comedy. A great wordsmith and entertainer.

Tom Chettoe, November 2009

There is no one now living as good as this guy.

alan francis, February 2009

It's the only death of his I know of. RIP

Gareth Berliner, September 2008

I hope I'm still doing this when I'm seventy one. A great reason to live, then die

Brendon Burns, June 2008