The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was the full name of
NBC's
The Tonight Show during the years that
Johnny Carson hosted from
1962 to
1992. Under Carson, the show won seven
Emmy Awards and another thirty-five nominations.
For all but a few months of its first ten years of existence, Carson's
Tonight Show was based in
New York City. In
May 1972, the show moved to
Burbank, California, where it remained for the rest of its run.
The Tonight Show has continued to this day under a largely identical structure with
Jay Leno as host.
Ed McMahon
 |
McMahon in the 1960s, during a Carson monologue. |
The show's announcer and Carson's sidekick was
Ed McMahon, who from the very first show would introduce Carson with a drawn-out
"Heeeeeeeeere's Johnny!" (something McMahon was inspired to do by the over-emphasized way he had introduced reporter
Robert Pierrepoint on the NBC Radio show
Monitor). McMahon, who had served the same purpose for Carson's
ABC game show
Who Do You Trust? for five years previously, would remain standing to the side as Carson did his
monologue, laughing (sometimes obsequiously) at his jokes, then join him at the guest chair when Carson moved to his desk. The two would usually interact in a comic spot for a short while before the first guest was introduced.
McMahon commented on his role in his
1998 autobiography
For Laughing Out Loud (ISBN 0446523704)::"My role on the show never was strictly defined. I did what had to be done when it had to be done. I was there when he needed me, and when he didn't I moved down the couch and kept quiet. The farther down the couch I moved, the quieter I was. I did the audience warm-up, I did commercials, for a brief period I cohosted the first fifteen minutes of the show..., and I performed in many
sketches. On our thirteenth-anniversary show Johnny and I were talking at his desk and he said,
"Thirteen years is a long time."Long enough for me to recognize my cue. So, I asked,
"how long is it?" "That's why you're here", he said, probably summing up my primary role on the show
I had to support him, I had to help him get to the
punch line, but while doing it I had to make it look as if I wasn't doing anything at all. The better I did it, the less it appeared as if I was doing it....If I was going to play
second fiddle, I wanted to be the
Heifetz of second fiddlers.:....The most difficult thing for me to learn how to do was just sit there with my mouth closed. Many nights I'd be listening to Johnny and in my mind I'd reach the same
adlib just as he said it. I'd have to bite my tongue not to say it out loud. I had to make sure I wasn't too funny—although critics who saw some of my other performances will claim I needn't have worried. If I got too many laughs, I wasn't doing my job; my job was to be part of a team that generated the laughs."
Bandleaders and others
The Tonight Show had a live band for nearly all of its existence. The
NBC Orchestra during Carson's reign was led by
Skitch Henderson, followed briefly by
Milton DeLugg. Starting in
1967 and continuing until
Jay Leno took over, the band was led by
Doc Severinsen, with
Tommy Newsom filling in for him when he was absent or filling in for McMahon as the announcer (which usually happened when a guest host substituted for Carson, which usually gave McMahon the night off as well).
Behind the scenes,
Fred de Cordova joined
The Tonight Show in
1970 as producer, graduating to
executive producer in
1984.
|
Carson as Carnac the Magnificent. |
*
Carnac the Magnificent, where Carson played a psychic who gave a punchline to a joke before revealing the corny setup. This was to some degree a variation on
Steve Allen's recurring "The Question Man" sketch. "Carnac" examples:
*
"Billy Graham, Virginia Graham and Lester Maddox" ... "Name two Grahams and a Cracker!"*
"Debate" ... "What do you use to catch de fish?"*
"Frathouse" ... "What do you call a Japanese home struck by a meteor?":And apparently Ed McMahon's personal favorite, as he discussed on
Larry King::
"Sis Boom Bah" ... "Describe the sound when a sheep explodes!":If the laughter fell short, "Carnac" would face the audience with mock seriousness and say something along the lines of,
"May a diseased yak befriend your sister!" or
"May a rabid holyman bless your neither regions with a powertool!"* "Floyd R. Turbo", a dimwitted yokel responding to a TV station editorial.
* "Art Fern", the fast-talking host of a "Tea Time Movie" program, who advertised inane products and romanced his attractive blonde assistant, played by
Carol Wayne (1971-82) and
Teresa Ganzel (1982-91), when the camera was off.:The fake movies he would introduce usually had a cast of several actors with similar-sounding names, typically topped off by some variation on "Rex, the Wonder Horse.":On giving directions to a fake store he was touting, he would show a spaghetti-like road map, sometimes with a literal "fork in the road," other times making the joke,
"Go to the Slauson Cutoff...", and the audience would recite with him,
"...cut off your Slauson!"* "Aunt Blabby", an old woman whose appearance and speech pattern bore more than a passing resemblance to comedian
Jonathan Winters' character "Maude Frickert."
* "Stump the Band", where studio audience members ask the band to try to play obscure songs given only the title. Unlike when this routine was done during the
Jack Paar years with the
Jose Melis band, Doc's band almost never knew the song, but that did not stop them from inventing one on the spot. Example::Guest's request:
My Dead Dog Rover:Doc Severinsen, singing:
"My dead dog Rover / lay under the sun / and stayed there all summer / until he was done!"* "The Mighty Carson Art Players" (depending on your point of view, the name was an obvious tribute to or ripoff of radio legend
Fred Allen's Mighty Allen Art Players), which spoofed news, movies, television shows, and commercials.:Example: Johnny, dressed as a doctor, starting to talk about some intimate topic (just as in the real ad) and then being hit by cream pies from several directions at once.
* "The Edge of Wetness", in which Johnny would read humorous plot summaries of a fictional
soap opera while the camera
panned the audience, stopping on an unsuspecting audience member who Carson claimed was, for example, the butler from the soap.
October 1962-
December 1966: Monday-Friday 11:15 p.m.-1:00 a.m.
When Carson took over from
Jack Paar, he inherited a show that was 105 minutes long. The show was structured to have what appeared to be two openings, with one starting at 11:15 p.m. and including the monologue, and another which listed the guests and announced the host again, starting at 11:30. The two openings gave affiliates the option of having either a fifteen-minute or thirty-minute local news show preceding Carson.
As more affiliates introduced thirty minutes of local news, Carson's monologue was being seen by fewer people. To rectify this situation, from
February 1965 to
December 1966,
Ed McMahon and
Skitch Henderson began to co-host the first fifteen minutes of the show without Carson, who would then take over at 11:30.
January 1965-
September 1966: Saturday or Sunday 11:15-1:00 a.m. (reruns)
September 1966-
September 1975: Saturday or Sunday 11:30-1:00 a.m. (reruns)
January 1967-
September 1980: Monday-Friday 11:30 p.m.-1:00 a.m.
September 1980-
May 1991: Monday-Friday 11:30 p.m.-12:30 a.m.
Carson used threats of retirement to convince NBC the show should be shortened to sixty minutes; when Carson re-upped in
1980, the new, shorter length of the show was written into his contract.
May 1991-
May 1992: Monday-Friday 11:35 p.m.-12:35 a.m.
The show's start time was delayed by five minutes to allow NBC affiliates to include more commercials during the local news.
Virtually all of the pre-
1970 shows, including Carson's debut as host, were lost to history when, following standard procedure at the time, the extremely expensive videotapes were
reused. It was rumored that many other episodes were lost in a fire, but NBC has denied this. Other surviving material from the era has been found on
kinescopes held in the archives of the
Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, or in the personal collections of guests of the program. Longtime New York meteorologist
Dr. Frank Field, an occasional guest during the years he was weathercaster for
WNBC, showed several clips of his appearances with Carson in a
2002 career retrospective on
WWOR-TV; Field had maintained the clips in his own personal archives.
Thirty-minute audio recordings of many of these "missing" episodes are contained in the
Library of Congress in the Armed Forces Radio collection. Many
1970s-era episodes have been licensed to distributors of the sort that advertise mail order offers on late-night TV. The later shows are stored in an underground film archive in
Kansas.
|
Johnny Carson and David Letterman in 1987. |
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson had guest hosts each Monday for most of the show's run and sometimes for entire weeks during Johnny's frequent vacations. Various people served as guest host, some over fifty times. This list is the most frequent guest hosts of the first 21 years of the show's run; however, a complete list would have
Jay Leno,
Garry Shandling and
Joan Rivers well at the front, as they were the permanent guest hosts from
1987-
1992,
1986-
1987 and
1982-
1986, respectively:
*
Joey Bishop (177 times, mostly in the 1960s)
*
Joan Rivers (93)
*
John Davidson (87)
*
Bob Newhart (87)
*
David Brenner (70)
*
McLean Stevenson (58)
*
Jerry Lewis (52, mostly in the 1960s)
*
David Letterman (51)
A
1982 episode hosted by Rivers was the first
stereo broadcast in television history.
Carson himself had been an occasional guest host during the years when
Jack Paar was the regular host, and Paar repeatedly claimed he had been the one to suggest to NBC that Carson replace him when he left the show in
1962.
Starting in
September 1983, Joan Rivers was designated Carson's permanent guest host, a role she had been essentially filling for more than a year before then. In
1986, she abruptly left for
her own show on the then new
Fox Network. This move infuriated Carson so much that he banned Rivers from his show, cancelling even the three weeks of guest hosting she was scheduled to do in the remainder of the
1985-86 television season. Unfortunately for Rivers, her new show flopped and was quickly cancelled, and she never appeared on the show with Carson again. In a
CNN interview after Carson's death, Rivers revealed that Carson never spoke to her again, even on the occasion when Rivers confronted him in a Los Angeles restaurant.
As his impending retirement approached, Carson tried to avoid too much sentimentality, but would periodically show clips of some of his favorite moments and revisit with some of his favorite guests.
But no one was quite prepared for Carson's next-to-last night, where he hosted his final guests,
Robin Williams and
Bette Midler. Williams was in top form with his manic energy and stream-of-consciousness lunacy. Midler, in contrast, found the emotional vein of the farewell; this culminated when she slowly sang, sitting next to him, the pop standard "
One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)." Carson became unexpectedly tearful, and the scene of the two of them was captured by a camera angle from across the set which had never been used before. This penultimate show was immediately recognized as a television classic, and Midler would win an Emmy Award for her role in it.
Carson did not have guests on his final episode of
The Tonight Show. An estimated 50 million people watched this retrospective show, which ended with him sitting on a stool alone on the stage, curiously similar to Jack Paar's last show. He gave these final words of goodbye:
And so it has come to this. I am one of the lucky people in the world. I found something that I always wanted to do and I have enjoyed every single minute of it. I bid you a very heartfelt goodnight.During his final speech, Carson told the audience that he hoped to return with a project
"that will meet with your approval" but ultimately he chose never to return to television with another show of his own. In one of his few post-retirement interviews, Carson hinted in a
December 1993 interview with
Tom Shales of the
Washington Post that he didn't think he could top what he had already accomplished.
Carson appeared briefly on
Bob Hope's 90th birthday special on NBC and did a voiceover as himself on
The Simpsons on FOX, both in
May 1993. He spoke to
David Letterman via telephone on Letterman's
Late Show on
CBS in
November 1993. Carson followed that with an appearance on
The Kennedy Center Honors on CBS in
December 29,
1993 to receive a lifetime achievement award; he never spoke and only sat in the balcony with the Clintons and the other honorees. During Letterman's week of shows in Los Angeles on CBS in
May 1994, Carson passed by in a car during a skit early in the week and then walked onto the set on a later show to hand Dave the Top Ten list. He never spoke, citing
laryngitis afterward, but received a long standing ovation from the live audience. It was Carson's last new TV appearance ever.
Johnny Carson died of complications from
emphysema on
January 23,
2005 at age 79.
* Carson's announcer and first guest on his first
Tonight Show as regular host was
Groucho Marx, who had been one of many substitute hosts following the departure of
Jack Paar.
* No video of Carson's first appearance on
The Tonight Show is known to exist. However, an audio recording of the broadcast has been played on television. Carson began his first monologue reacting to the applause by saying
"Boy, you'd think it was Vice President Nixon", and later crying
"I want my na-na!"* Perhaps the most celebrated example of Johnny being quick-on-his feet was the "
Ed Ames tomahawk" incident on
April 29,
1965. This was a black-and-white
kinescope film clip thankfully saved from the New York years, and typically played every year on the anniversary show. Ames was then playing a Native American on the
Daniel Boone TV series, starring
Fess Parker. Ames was attempting to demonstrate how to throw a hatchet in the air to hit a target, the outline of a cowboy on a piece of plywood. The throw hit the figure in the upper leg, close enough to the crotch for its up-turned handle to look like an erection, and the audience burst into laughter and applause. Ames instinctively started to go retrieve the hatchet, but Carson smoothly held him back. When the laughter had almost died down, Carson remarked,
"I didn't even know you were Jewish!" and the audience burst into applause again.
* One memorable Tonight Show featured
Charles Nelson Reilly performing
Hamlet, as featured in the
2006 motion picture,
The Life of Reilly[
1], a film of the life story of Mr. Reilly. Reilly was a frequent guest of Johnny's, appearing in over 100 episodes.
*
George Carlin was a frequent guest on
The Tonight Show, so when the debut of
Saturday Night Live was in preparation there was supposedly an agreement that
SNL's producers would not have Carlin on their show. As it happened, Carlin appeared on the very first airing of
SNL. Johnny Carson was incensed over this, and when he asked why Carlin had been hired, he was told
"because he is punctual and fills out forms well." |
Carson caught off-guard by one of Jim Fowler's animals. |
* Zoologists such as
Joan Embry of the
San Diego Zoo and
Jim Fowler of
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom were recurring guests who would bring with them often exotic animals that he could interact with to comedic effect. In one frequently-shown clip, he leaned over a little too closely to the cage of a panther, which swiped its claws at him. Carson ran across the stage and jumped into Ed McMahon's arms.
* Carson and
Paul Anka are both credited with co-writing "
Johnny's Theme", the well-known title music for his show. Anka later revealed that Carson and his management demanded a 50
% cut of the song's publishing in exchange for choosing it as the
theme song. Both men collected millions of dollars on the arrangement.
The Tonight Show received an enormous audience on
December 17,
1969, when
Tiny Tim married
Miss Vicki during the show. It's the 2nd-highest
rated episode of
The Tonight Show, behind only Carson's final episode.
* In
1973, Carson had a legendary run-in with popular
psychic Uri Geller when he invited Geller to appear on his show. Carson, an experienced stage
magician, wanted a neutral demonstration of Geller's alleged abilities, so, at the advice of his friend and fellow magician
James Randi, he gave Geller several spoons out of his desk drawer and asked him to bend them. Geller proved unable to do so, and that appearance has since been regarded as the beginning of Geller's fall from glory. In
1987, Carson and Randi joined forces again to expose
faith healing televangelist Peter Popoff by playing an audiotape of Popoff receiving information from an employee about "healed" followers at meetings then crediting them as a Godly vision. Funds to Popoff's television ministry dropped soon after.
* A monologue tradition evolved over the years in which Carson would say a phrase in his monologue such as
"It was so (hot/cold/dark/etc.)...". and someone in the audience would invariably call out,
"How was it?" which would set up Carson's rejoinder
"It was so , that ...." and complete the joke.
* Occasionally, off-color language would sneak into jokes and discussion. Rather than simply bleep the offending words, the tape would instead be garbled, making it sound as if Johnny (or whomever) momentarily spoke
gibberish. One notable example of this occurred when a Carnac skit flopped one night. After yet another joke failed, Carson uttered
"holy shit" and played up the moment by trying to carry his desk offstage. Television viewers, however, instead heard the words
"holy palooga." One rare exception to this self-censorship occurred during a stunt Carson participated in that involved him being suspended high above the stage. At one point, however, Carson was unexpectedly dropped several feet (part of the stunt) and Carson, caught off guard, shouted
"Shit!" This was not censored and later in the broadcast, Carson apologized for his language. Skeptic and friend
James Randi, in an interview with
Penn and Teller for the 1st Season DVD of
Bullshit!, told of a time when Carson had the reverend
Peter Popoff on his show. When a clip played of how Popoff pulled off his psychic tricks, Randi claims Carson said a
"very harsh word, even worse than the title of your show "[Bullshit!]"."* One of the more memorable moments during Carson's stint as
Tonight Show host came in
1987, when elderly
Myrtle Young ("the
potato chip lady") was invited to show off her collection of chips that resembled animals and famous people. While Young was distracted by McMahon, Carson crunched on a chip â€" not from her collection, but from a bowl beside his desk. Young turned back towards Carson with a horrified expression, but saw nothing missing; she sighed with apparent relief when Carson showed her the bowl. He then apologized for the joke.
Frederick De Cordova*
The Tonight Show from the
Museum of Broadcast Communications website
*
Carson's official Tonight Show website*
Register of His Papers in the
Library of Congress*
The Man Who Retired a June 2002
Esquire article also available
here*
Johnny Carson, late-night TV legend, dies at 79, a January 2005
CNN article
*[
2] A
New Yorker profile of Carson from 1978
