George Carlin: Radical stand-up comedian

To audiences outside the United States, the American comedian George Carlin was the most excellent Rufus, the world's coolest time traveller, in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, the 1989 slacker comedy starring Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. The film became a cult and Carlin's character, who played some shredding guitar, reprised his mentoring role in Bill & Ted's Bogus Adventure in 1991.

But to generations of Americans, Carlin was a stand-up comedian of the magnitude of Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, whose radical stance he emulated by performing challenging material which was never gratuitously rude but pointed out the contradictions inherent in such euphemisms as "battle fatigue" and "collateral damage".

Indeed, Carlin's fascination with the use and misuse of language inspired his most famous monologue, "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television", which became a cause célèbre. When the comedian was arrested after performing it in Milwaukee in July 1972, the judge ruled he had a right to free speech. However, after the New York radio station WBAI broadcast a longer version, entitled "Filthy Words", from his album Occupation Foole during the day in October 1973, a listener complained to the Federal Communications Commission and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1978, a slim majority eventually decided that such provocative material could only go out after the watershed on radio and television, in case children might be listening, a ruling which holds to this day. Carlin's reaction was: "My name is a footnote in American history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of."

Born in New York in 1937, Carlin grew up in what he jokingly referred to as "white Harlem" but his childhood was unusual enough, since he and his elder brother were mostly brought up by his mother, who ran the New York office of the Philadelphia Bulletin. A typical class clown, George Carlin dropped out of high school and joined the US Air Force in the mid-Fifties.

He proved to be a natural as a wise-cracking disc jockey for a local radio station KJOE while stationed at Shreveport, Louisiana. Discharged for drunkenness in 1957, he joined the Boston station WEZE but was fired after taking their mobile news car to New York to buy drugs on the very night the vehicle was needed to cover a riot breaking out at Massachusetts State Prison.

Moving on to KXOL in Fort Worth, Texas, he formed a double act with the newscaster Jack Burns. In 1960, the pair relocated to Hollywood and joined KDAY as morning hosts. They began performing in night-clubs, recorded an album and appeared on television but decided to go their separate ways in 1962.

Newly married and with a daughter to support, Carlin struggled in New York and Los Angeles for several years as a run-of-the-mill comedian, making fun of weathermen and America's obsession with sport. He found his métier, though, after dropping acid in the late Sixties, growing a beard and long hair, and concentrating on weightier matters like the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon's presidency and greed. Now in tune with the counter-culture, he developed a cocaine habit but cleverly managed to dispose of any incriminating evidence whenever he was arrested.

In October 1975, Carlin hosted the first episode of Saturday Night Live, the comedy show broadcast by NBC, appeared on the same channel's The Tonight Show more than 130 times, recorded an unprecedented and still unmatched 14 HBO specials and 23 albums, including the Grammy-winners FM & AM (1972), Jammin' In New York (1992), Brain Droppings (2001) and Napalm and Silly Putty (2002).

Carlin often offended audiences with his edgier material, but he slowly moved into the mainstream, appearing in The Simpsons, narrating the American version of Thomas the Tank Engine, acting opposite Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand in The Prince of Tides (1991) and voicing a character in the Pixar animated feature Cars (2006). He was always critical of his own acting abilities – "acceptable, not there yet" he said about Bill & Ted – but nevertheless relished playing parts like Cardinal Ignatius Glick, "a religious marketing hustler" in the left-of-centre Kevin Smith comedy Dogma (1999).

"I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is and to cross it deliberately," he once said.

Pierre Perrone

George Denis Patrick Carlin, comedian and actor: born New York 12 May 1937; married 1961 Brenda Hosbrook (died 1997; one daughter), 1998 Sally Wade; died Santa Monica, California 22 June 2008.