linguistic:translation
Early life

George Denis Patrick Carlin was born at New York Hospital (now Weill Cornell Medical Center) in the Manhattan borough of New York City on May 12, 1937, the son of Mary (née Bearey; 1896–1984) and Patrick John Carlin (1888–1945). He had an older brother named Patrick Jr. (1931–2022), who had a major influence on his comedy and was sometimes directly involved. Carlin described himself as "fully Irish" as his mother was born in New York to Irish immigrants and his father was an Irish immigrant from Cloghan, County Donegal. In his posthumously published autobiography Last Words, he wrote about a fantasy of Ireland he would often have when his first wife Brenda was alive: "The southeastern parts so that it would be a little warmer, and the two of us there, close enough to Dublin that you could go buy things you needed." Carlin's maternal grandfather was an NYPD police officer who wrote out the works of William Shakespeare by hand for fun. Carlin's parents separated when he was two months old due to the alcoholism of his father, who Carlin said was "never around". His mother raised him and his brother on her own. When Carlin was eight years old, his father died.

Carlin said that he picked up an appreciation for the effective use of the English language from his mother, though they had a difficult relationship and he often ran away from home. He grew up on West 121st Street in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, which he and his friends called "White Harlem " because it "sounded a lot tougher than its real name". He attended Corpus Christi School, a Catholic parish school of the Corpus Christi Church in Morningside Heights. One of Carlin's closest childhood friends was Randy Jurgensen, who would later go on to become one of the most decorated homicide detectives in NYPD history. His mother owned a television, which was a new technology few people owned at the time, and Carlin became an avid fan of the pioneering late-night talk show Broadway Open House during its short run. He went to the Bronx for high school, but was expelled from Cardinal Hayes High School after three semesters at age 15. He briefly attended Bishop Dubois High School in Harlem and Salesian High School in Goshen. He spent many summers at Camp Notre Dame in Spofford, New Hampshire, where he regularly won the camp's drama award; upon his death, some of his ashes were scattered at Spofford Lake per his request.

Carlin joined the U.S. Air Force and trained as a radar technician. He was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, Louisiana, and began working as a DJ at radio station KJOE in nearby Shreveport in July 1956. Labeled an "unproductive airman" by his superiors, he received a general discharge on July 29, 1957. During his time in the Air Force, he had been court-martialed three times and received many nonjudicial punishments and reprimands.