Irreverent comedian dies

The reports say George Carlin left us a legacy of 7 infamous words that were unable to be said on public airwaves.

In fact there were EIGHT such unmentionable words.

Carlin, who hosted the initial broadcast of “Saturday Night Live” in 1975, was probably best known for a monologue that began, “I was thinking about the curse words and the swear words, the cuss words and the words that you can’t say.” It developed into a counter-culture comedic routine, known as “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” Publicly uttering those words resulted in his arrest, followed by a landmark indecency case after a New York radio station aired his recitation in 1973.

The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 that the sketch was “indecent but not obscene,” and gave the Federal Communications Commission broader discretion in determining what constituted indecency on the nation’s airwaves. Associated Press has more here.