Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Thirty Years Later - Johnny is still the King of Late Night TV




Is Johnny Carson really still the King of late night, some 30 years after his last show aired in 1992?  Some people may say Jay Leno is better, or Jimmy Fallon - but I don't think so!

Johnny in 1970

We can argue about who is the best, but there is no question that the three decade run of Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show was both memorable and historic. 

Johnny was not the first host of “Tonight” and he was not the last, but he was the most memorable by far. The program began in 1954, around the time dramatic radio was closing its doors.  By then television had pretty much taken over and even the top rated radio shows were lucky if they could draw a million listeners. 

Most of the big radio stars had already deserted the medium in favor of the little ten inch boxes that displayed grainy, black and white images that talked and moved. 

Steve Allen was one of the first radio people to achieve stardom on TV when he became the first host of Tonight, which was an experimental program in 1954. Steve nailed it so well that he was able to leave the program in 1956 to do prime time shows.
 
Jack Paar was the second host of Tonight, and though he was successful, he was not a comic per se, and never generated the kind of interest that Steve Allen did or Johnny Carson would later.

The most memorable thing about Paar ‘s tenure on “Tonight” was his quitting after NBC cut four minutes out of his recorded broadcast of February 10, 1960.

Paar told  a rambling (frankly it was boring) tale about a boy and a W.C. (Water Closet -A term used at the time in England for ‘bathroom)’ The NBC censors considered the four minute joke to be dirty and snipped the entire segment from the broadcast without telling Parr.

Incensed by the network’s decision Parr quit the show, and the resulting kerfuffle was the talk of radio, TV, newspapers, and water coolers for weeks.  

When Jack found out the next day that four minutes of the show had been censored, he told a live nationwide audience, “I’ve been up for thirty hours without an ounce of sleep wrestling with my conscience all day.  I’ve made a decision about what I’m going to do.  I’m leaving ‘The Tonight Show’.  There must be a better way to make a living than this.”

Regret soon mimicked the censors by robbing Parr of sleep.  After less than 30 days, he returned to the program and told the audience that he found out ‘there isn’t a better way to make a living than this.’  

Just two years later Parr was gone. He was replaced by young Johnny Carson, a Jack Benny wannabe, who held down the time slot for the next thirty years.

Seven years before his debut on "Tonight" Johnny got to appear
 on the TV show of  his idol, Jack Benny.



Enough about the other guys, 

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeees  

Johnny!
(or at least some of his most memorable moments)

One of Johnny Carson;s best known segments, one that demonstrated to the world just how quick his wit really was, happened two years after he began his run on The Tonight Show. On April 29, 1965, Ed Ames of the Daniel Boone television series was Carson’s guest. Ames was demonstrating how to throw a tomahawk using a wooden silhouette of a man, and when he threw the tomahawk it landed squarely in the silhouettes crotch. As the crowd laughed, Carson quipped, I didn’t even know you were Jewish. This piece of classic television comedy was so popular that it was often replayed on the shows anniversary.
Other timeless moments on The Tonight Show revolved around some of the recurring characters that Johnny Carson portrayed, often with the help of Ed McMahon. 
Quite possibly the most famous of these classic television characters was Carnac the Magnificent, a mentalist played by Carson who would claim to be able to answer questions sealed in envelopes without ever seeing the question. 
The answers, of course, would never be straight answers and would instead be puns. When the audience didn’t like one of the jokes, he would respond with equally outlandish curses, such as May a diseased yak befriend your sister. Carson had a number of other popular characters as well, such as Floyd R. Turbo, Ralph Willie, and Aunt Blabby.
Not all of the comedy sketches that Carson did contained these repeating characters. There were a number of one-shot skits which appeared on the classic television show, including Carson’s portrayal of Hamlet delivering the famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. 
In the Johnny Carson version, however, were a number of product advertisements which flowed directly from the famous Shakespearean lines to create one of the funniest portrayals of the play to date.
Dick Cavett (left) and Alan King roasting Johnny at the Friar's Club

In addition to providing laughs and unexpected punch-lines, Carson would from time to time use his show as a means of exposing scams and fakes who were taking advantage of the public at large. 
Famed psychic Uri Gellar appeared on the show in 1973. Carson himself set up the props for Gellar’s act without Gellar or his manager being able to see them before filming. Despite Gellar’s claims of having genuine mental powers, he was unable to reproduce his usual tricks with the props that Carson provided.
This method of proving Gellar a fraud had been suggested by Carson’s friend James Randi, a trained stage magician (like Carson himself) who later appeared on the show in 1987 to expose the supposed faith healer Peter Popoff. Though Popoff claimed that his knowledge of the audience’s problems came from Godly visions, Randi provided Carson and his audience with video that showed Popoff’s wife describing the people for him to heal via a microphone which broadcast to a speaker hidden in his hearing aid.
Other classic TV moments on The Tonight Show included visits from zoologists such as Joan Embry and Jim Fowler. They brought animals which Carson would often interact with in some way; many episodes featured Carson being crawled on by smaller animals. One famous incident often shown as a clip featured Carson leaning down too close to a panther’s cage which caused the cat to swipe at him with its paw. Carson ran across the stage and jumped into Ed McMahons arms for comedic effect.
When Johnny Carson retired from the show, his final episodes were major events. The most sentimental moment came on the next-to-last of his episodes. Bette Midler and Robin Williams were his guests. After Carson revealed in conversation some of his favorite songs, Midler began to sing one. The song soon became a duet between her and Carson. She finished her appearance by singing ‘One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)’.
An emotional Carson began to tear up on camera. This historic and touching moment was caught on film using a long camera angle never used in the previous 30 years of Carson’s run. One of his most emotional classic moments became a historic milestone in late night television filming.
Future generations may look back upon the early two thousands and say that those who followed John Carson were equally as good and entertaining.  I hope so.  For I want them to have a sack-full of pleasant, humorous memories just as big as the pile of laughs my generation got from 30 years worth of Ed McMahon saying, Here’s Johnny!
Photo Credit: Ally Union at English Wikipedia

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Bill Russo, best known for his appearance on Monsters and Mysteries in America on Destination America, and in the Bridgewater Triangle Documentary; is the author of more than four dozen books and shorts stories, available on all major bookselling sites such as Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble and more.  Much of his work is FREE on Smashwords.  

He is also the producer, writer, director, and sometimes performer in the free podcast,
Bill Russo's Short Story Theater.
The program is currently in its second season with more than 40 episodes available for listening on all podcast sites from Apple to Zebra, World-wide.
The original audio play of 'Sherlock Holmes on Cape Cod' has had thousands of listeners and even drew high praise from a Sherlock Holmes society based in London. Google Bill Russo's Short Story Theater, Sherlock Holmes on Cape Cod, to listen for free. https://www.spreaker.com/user/11578348/sherlock-holmes-on-cape-cod




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