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!
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| 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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