His comedic assault on propriety topped out - or bottomed out, if you prefer - with the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," which made him a counterculture hero from the early 1970s on.

But Carlin, who died at 71 of heart failure on Sunday night in Santa Monica, Calif., probably would have preferred the word outlaw.

"My heart had always been the heart of an outlaw, the heart of a rebel," he said in an interview with The Inquirer last fall, explaining why he moved to edgier material in the late 1960s after wowing audiences with innocuous fare like "Al Sleet, the hippy-dippy weatherman" and "Wonderful WINO."

It was simply a matter of personal evolution, said Carlin, who was ranked by Comedy Central as the second best stand-up comedian of all time, behind Richard Pryor and before his idol, Lenny Bruce.

"I could see I was doing the wrong kind of material for the wrong kind of people in the wrong kind of places," including colleges. "So, I changed what I was doing . . . and I came out the other end as more of a person who spoke his own personal version of the truth."

That "personal version of the truth" got him locked up in Milwaukee in 1972 for a performance that included all seven of the words you couldn't say on TV. (At least one - a synonym for urine - can be heard on TV today.)

Carlin, who posted a copy of the arrest report on his official Web site, was charged with disturbing the peace and released on $150 bail. A judge dismissed the case, saying Carlin had been exercising his right of free speech.

A New York radio station later broadcast the forbidden words, drawing a citation from the Federal Communications Commission. The Supreme Court upheld the penalty, ruling in 1978 that the FCC had the power to prohibit broadcasts of offensive language during hours when children might hear.

"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," Carlin told the Associated Press this year.

Perversity flowed like a stream of acid through Carlin's humor, which often displayed a misanthrope's touch. "If you love someone, set them free," he observed. "If they come home, set them on fire."

He dismissed soccer moms with (surprise!) an obscenity, and snarled his disrespect for human intelligence: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

He turned defensive when an interviewer asked him how a hip, hard-edged comic could provide a voice for the G-rated Pixar movie Cars, or take the role of the magical Mr. Conductor on the 1990s PBS children's series Shining Time Station and introduce moralizing tales of Thomas the Tank Engine.

"Shining Time Station and movies and this thing and that thing, those have nothing really to do with who I am overall," Carlin said. "They were sidelines; they're little detours, and most of them were dead ends anyway."

Yet in conversation, Carlin could be gracious. After failing to connect with a reporter for an interview the night before Thanksgiving, he left an apologetic message and his cell phone number.

His family life as an adult was stable, although he developed a drug habit and, according to the Associated Press, checked into rehab in 2004.

He was married to Brenda Hosbrook from 1961 until her death in 1997.

He is survived by his wife, Sally Wade, and daughter, Kelly Carlin McCall, and his brother, Patrick.

George Denis Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, in the Morningside Heights section of New York City. ("God winces," Carlin's Web site notes, of his birth.) His parents separated soon after he was born, and he lived with his mother.

Carlin, raised Catholic, said he valued the education he received at Corpus Christi parochial school - ironically, because it gave him the intellectual independence to reject religion. ("The only good thing to come out of religion was the music," he joked.)

After dropping out of school in 1953, he joined the Air Force. Military life didn't suit Carlin, who found himself in one disciplinary scrape after another until he was discharged in 1957 as "unproductive."

But his Air Force years were not a total loss. While stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, Carlin began his show business career as a disc jocky at radio station KJOE in Shreveport.

Out of the service, he got radio jobs in Boston and Texas, then migrated to Hollywood with his friend Jack Burns in 1960 to perform as the comedy team of Burns & Carlin. In October, they appeared on the Tonight Show when Jack Paar was the host.

In 1962, Burns & Carlin separated amicably, and Carlin began a meteoric ride of one TV guest shot after another: Paar, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, Jimmy Dean, Johnny Carson all welcomed him.

He would go on to do 14 HBO specials and 23 comedy shows. He hosted the 1975 premiere of Saturday Night Live, and won four Grammy Awards for spoken comedy album.

On Tuesday, the Kennedy Center announced that Carlin would receive the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. His death is "a great loss, not only to the world of humor but to America's conscience," the show's producers said yesterday. "George kept us honest."

Carlin was the author of three books: Brain Droppings (1997), Napalm & Silly Putty (2001) and When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (2004).

Late in his career, he described himself as, primarily, a writer. "I'm a writer who gets to perform his own material onstage and also gets to put that in book form," he said. "What I'm interested in is expressing myself verbally on stage, the way I started to do when I was a teenage kid."

Carlin said his development as a writer affected his performing style. His routines became spoken essays, "long and extended pieces, set pieces on a given subject."

While critical of society, Carlin was no political activist. His view of the human condition was bleak.

"I really don't have a stake in any of this," he said. "I'm not a cheerleader for a certain outcome. Most liberals who despair of the current state of things, most of them think there's a solution and so they're naturally disappointed. It's built into their thinking system.

"I know there's no solution, so I just enjoy what's here and I enjoy the journey."