George Denis Patrick Carlin was born at New York Hospital in Manhattan on May 12, 1937, the second of two sons born to Mary (née Bearey, 1896–1984) and Patrick John Carlin (1888–1945).
Carlin had an older brother, Patrick Jr. (1931–2022), who later had a major influence on his comedy.
His mother was born in New York City to Irish immigrants and his father was himself an Irish immigrant from Cloghan, a village in County Donegal in Ulster, leading Carlin to later describe himself as "fully Irish".
He wrote in his posthumously published autobiography Last Words that, when his first wife Brenda was alive, "I used to have a fantasy of Ireland, 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." His parents separated when he was two months old because of his father's alcoholism, so his mother raised him and his brother on her own.
His father died when Carlin was eight years old.
Carlin's maternal grandfather, Dennis Bearey, was an NYPD police officer, who wrote out the works of William Shakespeare by hand for fun.
