Johnny Carson was born on this days a century ago. One hundred years ago?! You are correct, sir.
The Emmy and Peabody award-winning entertainer died in 2005 at age 79. In 30 years as host of The Tonight Show, Carson presided over over 4500 episodes, interviewing over 25,000 guests. From 1962 to 1992 he was the undisputed King of Latenight.
How forgotten is he? Not at all for those of us of a certain age. Barely a day goes by that a Carson Tonight clip featuring Rodney Dangerfield or Don Rickles doesn’t pop up on my Instagram feed. Yet if you are 32, like my son, you never saw him in latenight. For Dan’s generation, Carson is a punchline on The Simpsons. (A cartoon Carson is seen in an early season episode doing a Carnac gag, goofing on the B-Sharps).
Simpson’s showrunner Al Jean got his first job out of Harvard as a writer on the final season of Carson’s Tonight Show and calls him “The Citizen Kane of comedy.” In the last few years, there have been other impressions shared in books and on-line. The late great Carl Reiner says he found Carson “standoffish” and “aloof” at times. Doc Severinsen, his bandleader, admitted he was intimidated by the boss. Bill Zehme, who passed away in 2023 before finishing his long-awaited biography, “Carson The Magnificient” (completed by his assisstant, Mike Thomas), described him as Marshall McLuhan’s prototype – “he burned cool in a hot medium.”
Zehme’s book was a disappointment to me. I found it challenging to read, and only succeeded in finishing it by abandoning the long first chapter and jumping ahead. After 20 years of over-research and writing, Zehme seemed too close to his subject.
A new book – “Love Johnny Carson: One Obsessive Fan’s Journey to Find the Genius Behind the Legend” (Penguin) is getting good reviews. Author Mark Malkoff (above) interviewed more than 400 people, including the guy who held the curtain open for Carson to walk through each night. Malkoff apparently delivers a very entertaining portrait of Carson as well as the pop comedy landscape of the last half century.
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I had the good fortune to attend a live studio taping of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson in “beautiful downtown” Burbank, Calif., in the mid 1980s. I actually witnessed three Carson-era Tonight tapings but with Carson off two out of five nights a week by that point, one was hosted by Joan Rivers and another by Garry Shandling.
It was electric to see Carson’s incredible star power as he came through that curtain as Severinsen led the NBC Orchestra through Paul Anka’s Tonight Show Theme. During the commercial breaks, however, it was equally fascinating to see how Carson completely ignored his guests. Clearly this helped him keep the best parts of the conversation for the show, but it also gave the impression that he was strikingly aloof.
Over the years I have picked up great insights on Carson from a diverse group of showbiz people. One was Dave Thomas, the former SCTV star currently featured on the fantastic new documentary “John Candy: I Like Me” (Prime Video). Thomas, who has guested three times on my podcast, once told me that, a few years after Carson retired from Tonight, he lucked into having lunch with the man. The St. Catherine’s, Ont., native was co-starring opposite Brett Butler on Grace Under Fire at the time.
A guy who wrote jokes for Carson, Bob Smith, also worked on Grace Under Fire. That series was shot on the Radford Studios lot in the Valley north of Hollywood. Carson’s nephew Jeff Sotzing, who ran Carson Productions, happened to be on the lot and started chatting and eventually laughing with Thomas and Smith. That’s when, as Thomas tells it, Carson, who was at his office about an hour away in Venice Beach, called his nephew and asked what all the laughing was about. As Thomas tells it:
And he said, ‘I’m standing here with Dave Thomas and Bob Smith having a few laughs,’ and Johnny said, ’What? Well, get them down here. Ask them if they want to come to lunch.’ He didn’t want to be the only guy not having any laughs.
So Jeff said,’ Do you want to go have lunch with Johnny? ‘And we said yeah sure, so we went down there. I had lunch with him two or three times, three times… and it was like, it was just great. You know, I’d been on his show as a guest, so he knew me. He loved my Bob Hope impersonation.
And he just, he loved funny stories, he loved comedy and he loved making people laugh and, this was after he had retired and it was just fantastic to sit with the guy. The guy was an icon; he was my hero you know.
When I was growing up, the idea of being on The Tonight Show, there was nothing bigger in show biz. It was the biggest of big and when I went on that show I was really determined. I thought, I gotta make Johnny laugh and I went on there and I was sitting between Johnny and Buddy Hackett and made them both laugh. I was so proud of myself but the other thing I really felt was that, when you were in that room, if you made Johnny laugh, and I mean the kind of laugh where he did that cackle and bent forward over the desk, then you owned the room. Because the audience, once they saw that Johnny had endorsed you by laughing, you could do no wrong.
And then it’s like, no comic ever – it’s like, a surfer on a wave. Once you get that, you can ride. You can tell jokes and it really, it lights you up. It empowers you, it makes you think of stuff that you didn’t even think you could do, you know, because you just want to keep that laugh going.”
To Celebrate Carson’s centennial, follow this link to a very fitting and comprehesive tribute from Malkoff, Dan Pasternack and Jed Rosenzweig at the late night place to be on the Internet, LateNighter. You can also hear Malkoff along with producer-historian Dan Pasternack and Simpsons/The Critic writer producer Mike Reiss on a salute to Carson’s 100th on Frank Santopadre’s excellend podcast, Fun for All Ages.
