Carlin was born in Manhattan, the second son of Mary Beary, a secretary, and Patrick Carlin, a national advertising manager for the New York Sun. Carlin was of Irish descent and was raised a Roman Catholic.

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 months old. After three semesters, at the age of 15, Carlin involuntarily left Cardinal Hayes High School and briefly attended Bishop Dubois High School in Harlem. Carlin had a difficult relationship with his mother and often ran away from home. He later joined the United States Air Force and was trained as a radar technician. He was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base 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.

1960s

Within weeks of arriving in California in 1960, Burns and Carlin put together an audition tape and created The Wright Brothers, a morning show on KDAY in Hollywood. The comedy team worked there for three months, honing their material in beatnik coffeehouses at night. Years later when he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Carlin requested that it be placed in front of the KDAY studios. Burns and Carlin recorded their only album, Burns and Carlin at the Playboy Club Tonight, in May 1960 at Cosmo Alley in Hollywood.

In the 1960s, Carlin began appearing on television variety shows, notably The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight 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, initially with Jack Paar as host, then with Johnny Carson. Carlin became one of Carson's most frequent substitutes during the host's three-decade reign. Carlin was also cast in Away We Go, a 1967 comedy show. His material during his early career and his appearance, which consisted of suits and short-cropped hair, had been seen as "conventional", particularly when contrasted with his later anti-establishment material.

Carlin was present at Lenny Bruce's arrest for obscenity. As the police began attempting to detain members of the audience for questioning, they 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.

1970s

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 long hair, 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.

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An oral history, edited by Carlin's daughter, Kelly, was scheduled to be published in 2009. The book will contain stories from Carlin's friends and family and cover the considered high points of his career as well as the considered low, including his drug and alcohol addiction.

For a number of years prior to his death Carlin had been compiling and writing his autobiography, planning to release it in conjunction with a second, long-worked-on project, a one-man Broadway show tentatively titled New York City Boy, covering essentially the same topics. After his death his collaborator on the projects, Tony Hendra, edited the autobiography for release as Last Words (ISBN 1-4391-7295-1). The book covers Carlin's life up to around Life is Worth Losing, with the final chapter detailing future plans, including the planned one-man show. The book was released one year and four months after Carlin's death. The audio version of the book was read by George's brother Patrick and featured an interview with Tony Hendra and George's daughter, Kelly.

Discography

Main

• 1963: Burns and Carlin at the Playboy Club Tonight
• 1967: Take-Offs and Put-Ons
• 1972: FM & AM
• 1972: Class Clown
• 1973: Foole
• 1974: Toledo Window Box
• 1975: An Evening with Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo
• 1977: On the Road
• 1981: A Place for My Stuff
• 1984: Carlin on Campus
• 1986: Playin' with Your Head
• 1988: What Am I Doing In New Jersey?
• 1990: Explicit Lyrics
• 1992: Jammin' in New York
• 1996: Back in Town
• 1999: You Are All Diseased
• 2001: Complaints and Grievances
• 2006: Life Is Worth Losing
• 2008: It's Bad for Ya

Compilations

• 1978: Some of the Best of George Carlin
• 1984: The George Carlin Collection
• 1992: Classic Gold
• 1999: The Little David Years
• 2002: George Carlin on Comedy

Filmography

Television

• The Kraft Summer Music Hall (1966)
• That Girl (Guest appearance) (1966)
• The Ed Sullivan Show (multiple appearances)
• The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (season 3 guest appearance) (1968)
• The Flip Wilson Show (writer, performer) (1971—1973)
• The Mike Douglas Show (Guest) (February 18, 1972)
• Saturday Night Live (Host, episodes 1 and 183) (1975 & 1984)
• Justin Case (as Justin Case) (1988) TV movie directed Blake Edwards
• Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends (as American Narrator) (1991—1998)
• Shining Time Station (as Mr. Conductor) (1991—1993)
• The George Carlin Show (as George O'Grady) (1994) Fox
• Streets of Laredo (as Billy Williams) (1995)
• The Simpsons (as Munchie, episode 209) (1998)
• The Daily Show (guest on February 1, 1999; December 16, 1999; and March 10, 2004)
• MADtv (Guest appearance in episodes 518 & 524) (2000)
• Inside the Actors Studio (2004)

• In 1998, Carlin had a cameo playing one of the funeral-attending comedians in Jerry Seinfeld's HBO special I'm Telling You For The Last Time. In the funeral intro (the only thing being buried is Jerry Seinfeld's material) Carlin learns that neither friend Robert Klein nor Ed McMahon ever saw Jerry's act. Carlin did, and enjoyed it, but admits "I was full of drugs."

HBO specials

Bibliography

For several years before his death, Carlin had been working on a memoir, Last Words, in collaboration with writer Tony Hendra. Hendra secured permission from Carlin's family to go ahead with the book. It was published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press imprint on November 17, 2009.

Carlin also spent several years before his death writing a one-man show he planned to do on Broadway before his death, called Watch My Language or New York City Boy. It has been published in 2009 by Disney's Hyperion Books, who also published Carlin's Brain Droppings, Napalm and Silly Putty, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops, and the compilation Three Times Carlin: An Orgy of George. It was published in paperback as New York Boy in September 1, 2010, but has not been officially released.

Audiobooks

• Brain Droppings
• Napalm and Silly Putty
• More Napalm & Silly Putty
• George Carlin Reads to You
• When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

Since the birth of spam email on the internet, many chain-forwards, usually rantlike and with blunt statements of belief on political and social issues and attributed to being written (or stated) by George Carlin himself, have made continuous rounds on the junk email circuit. The website Snopes, an online resource that debunks historic and present urban legends and myths, has extensively covered these forgeries. Many of the falsely attributed email attachments have contained material that runs directly opposite to Carlin's viewpoints, with some being especially volatile toward racial groups, gays, women, the homeless, etc. Carlin himself, when he was made aware of each of these bogus emails, would debunk them on his own website, writing: "Nothing you see on the Internet is mine unless it comes from one of my albums, books, HBO specials, or appeared on my website," and that "it bothers me that some people might believe that I would be capable of writing some of this stuff."