George Carlin

George Carlin was born in Manhattan in 1937. Carlin attended Catholic schools and excelled in drama. As a young man, Carlin joined the U.S. Air Force and also worked as a disc jockey in Louisiana and Texas. He started working as a comedian in 1959, performing at a coffeehouse in Fort Worth, Texas. In the 1960s, Carlin began appearing regularly on TV variety shows such as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. Carlin recorded his first of 14 HBO comedy specials in 1977, with his routines focusing on criticizing modern American culture from the late-1980s on. Carlin died of heart failure, at 71 years old, in 2008.