News this morning that George Carlin has died, at the still-young age of 71.

Carlin was brilliant at seeing the absurdity of life; very little of it, I think, truly made sense to him. “Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?” he once mused. “Are they afraid someone will clean them?” He made his living being ironic.

He was a renegade and a rebel, and he didn’t exactly hold the Catholic Church in high esteem. Born and raised Catholic, he spent a fair amount of his adult life mocking it. As his obit notes, quoting him:

“The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things — bad language and whatever — it’s all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition,” Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. “There’s an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. … It’s reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have.”

So perhaps the ultimate irony, the last joke for the man who took such a dim view of religion, is that he died at a Catholic hospital, St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, on the Lord’s day, Sunday.

You can read more about George Carlin at the link. And a little googling will turn up some of his most memorable routines, like this one, all about “stuff.”

And here’s a classic bit of early Carlin, from the mid-60’s, and an appearance on The Tonight Show: