LOS ANGELES—When he shucked the coat and tie for black T-shirts and jeans, grew his hair and began to riff about those “Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV,” George Carlin became more than just the countercultural comedian.

Carlin, who died Sunday of heart failure at 71, took comedy itself in a whole new direction.

“His routines became part of the American lexicon,” fellow comedian Paul Rodriguez told The Associated Press on Monday. “They came to say a lot about America and its times.”

Arguably his most famous routine, though, was simply called “Seven Words.”

More than just an outpouring of obscenities, it was—as almost all Carlin routines were—a clever play on the sound and meaning of almost every word Carlin used. It’s only appropriate, then, that Carlin’s name is attached to a key U.S. Supreme Court free-speech ruling, albeit one limiting the right.

The 1978 decision, the result of a radio station playing “Seven Words,” upheld the government’s authority to issue sanctions for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.

“So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” Carlin told AP earlier this year.

Carlin suffered the first of several heart attacks when he was only 41. He said his coronary artery disease was the result of genetics.

“My father gave me this disease,” he told the AP in 2007. “But he also gave me my gift of gab, my sense of humor. So what the ... it was a good trade-off.”\