I still am in mourning!

Johnny Carson: The Rolling Stone Interview
By TIMOTHY WHITE
He sits behind his microphone
He speaks in such a manly tone . . .
Don’t you think he’s such a natural guy?
The way he’s kept it up could make you cry.
–the Beach Boys, “Johnny Carson”
Back in the late Fifties, when ABC-TV’s Who Do You Trust? daytime quiz show was headquartered in New York’s Little Theater, host Johnny Carson and sidekick Ed McMahon were frequent patrons of nearby Sardi’s bar. On at least one occasion, the pair enjoyed an overlong recess with their favorite publican and returned to the studio fairly pie-eyed. During the afternoon taping, Carson sought to engage the show’s guests in his usual wry repartee, but his liquid lunch had all but derailed his train of thought, causing him to repeatedly ask the contestants if they were married, where they hailed from, etc. Realizing his own limitations, Carson managed to turn the dangerously muddled situation into an uproarious circular conversation that delighted the studio audience and compelled ABC to let the questionable program run. To this day, Carson says that it was one of his favorite moments before the camera; he had fashioned another victory from near failure and offended no one in the process — because he let everyone in on his predicament.
Whether he is dispensing sly double-entendres or tropical barbs, Johnny disarms us with his personable delivery, as if each hit-or-miss crack were a parlor trick between mutually pleased friends. His true close friends are extremely few in number, however, and as guarded in their comments about him as he is about every aspect of his personal life and private self.
For seventeen years, he has been a mighty distraction in the nation’s bedrooms, keeping 15.5 million of us awake with his well-ordered antics. A true show-business legend, he has demonstrated unparalleled staying power in a medium characterized by shooting stars and swift burnouts. Yet few figures so famous in their own time have remained so elusive.
The fifty-three-year-old Carson has long since given up the jovial nightclub binges of the sort that once prompted an indignant Jacqueline Susann to dash a Black Russian in his face. He and his statuesque third wife, Joanna, now usually confine their socializing to small gatherings with such friends as Henry Bushkin, Johnny’s lawyer and trusted confidant. When not working on The Tonight Show or paying his annual visit to the Las Vegas stage, Carson is usually at home reading, watching TV (sparingly), playing tennis on his own court, working out in his gym, pounding skillfully on the set of white pearl drums that sit across from his gleaming weight-lifting apparatus, or practicing other enduring hobbies like magic and astronomy. When it comes to personal deportment and late-night comedy, the venerable host of The Tonight Show trades the capital sin of excess for the cardinal rule of control.
As a result, he is a virtual nonentity to the gossip columnists that haunt the lavish premieres, gaudy receptions and chic bistros that are the stomping grounds of the star community — a fact that pleases him greatly. And he has hardly made himself available to other members of the press; this is his first in-depth interview in thirteen years.
John William Carson was born in Corning, Iowa, on October 23rd, 1925, the son of Homer Lloyd and Ruth Hook Carson. The elder Carson was an itinerant lineman for an electric company, and the family (including daughter Catherine and son Richard) moved during the first eight years of John’s life to numerous other small towns in the state (like Shenandoah, Clarinda and Avoca) before settling in a large, frame house in Norfolk, Nebraska. By all accounts it was a secure childhood. Homer Carson landed a supervisory post with the Norfolk power and light company and the Carsons spent their summer vacations on a lake in Minnesota.
A shy child, Johnny nevertheless mustered the courage to make his acting debut as a bumblebee in a grammar-school skit. Roles in other school productions followed, and he simultaneously honed his household flair for mimicry, most notably a creditable impersonation of Popeye. At twelve, he came upon an inspirational text called Hoffman’s Book of Magic and quickly became immersed in the art of illusion. He sent away to various Chicago mail-order houses for additional manuals and tricks, and shortly thereafter received a black-velvet-covered magician’s table from his parents for Christmas.
Armed with these tools, “the Great Carsoni” first appeared at the age of fourteen before the local Rotary Club, his prodigious feats of prestidigitation rewarded with a purse of three dollars. His interest in dramatics and magic grew as he entered high school, and he shunned sports in favor of school plays and presentations of magic for Norfolk 4-H picnics. To earn additional money, he worked part time as a movie usher in the Granada Theater and sold Saturday Evening Post subscriptions door-to-door. A good student, he also wrote a humor column for the Norfolk High newspaper and contributed random notes of levity to the high school yearbook:
Football season opened this [September] and I went out to make the team. I would have too if they hadn’t found where I hid my brass knuckles . . . November was the month of blackouts, which the students enjoyed very much. December ended with Bob Jesson waiting at his fireplace for Santa Claus and bag. Bob was interested in the bag, I believe . . .
After graduating from high school in 1943, Carson toyed with the idea of becoming a psychiatrist or a journalist but shelved both notions when he was accepted in the navy’s V-12 training program. He later attended the midshipmen’s school at Columbia University and ultimately was assigned to the battleship Pennsylvania, bringing a footlocker of card tricks along for comic relief. Between entertaining his fellow swabbies and fighting in the Pacific, Johnny once found time to amuse Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal for several hours with his best sleight of hand.
Carson entered the University of Nebraska after his discharge in 1946, majoring in journalism with the intention of pursuing a career as a comedy writer. Boredom set in and he switched to radio and speech, a move that led to a ten-dollar-a-week writing job on Lincoln’s KFAB radio station in a comedy western entitled Eddie Sosby and the Radio Rangers. Carson eventually wrote a senior college thesis, “How to Write Comedy Jokes,” that was fleshed out with taped excerpts from the popular Fibber McGee and Molly program and the shows of Fred Allen and Jack Benny. The effort earned him an A.B. degree in 1949 and he settled in Omaha with his new wife, a fellow graduate and former magic assistant named Jody Wolcott.
In time, Johnny got his own show, The Squirrel’s Nest, on Omaha’s WOW-TV He also served as a disc jockey on WOW radio, often butchering the commercials of such local advertisers as the Friendly Savings Bank. (“Drop in any time. At two or three in the morning is fine. Help yourself. Just leave a note.”) With the help of a cameraman, Carson put together a half-hour audition film of his best routines and spent his vacation peddling it, to no avail, in San Francisco and Los Angeles. At length, a family friend intervened and recommended Johnny for a staff announcer job at KNXT-TV in L.A. This opportunity was parlayed into a Sunday afternoon broadcast, budgeted at twenty-five dollars per show, called Carson’s Cellar. Among the Cellar’s avid fans was a fellow named Red Skelton, who hired the witty young man as a writer and supporting player on his CBS-TV program. One night during rehearsal, Skelton was knocked cold by a breakaway door that failed to fulfill its function, and Carson was called in to substitute for the unconscious clown prince of television.
This stroke of luck led to the fateful creation by CBS of The Johnny Carson Show, a thirty-nine week clunker that was canceled in the spring of 1956. His burgeoning career suddenly deflated, the semistar found himself playing a club in remote Bakersfield, California, to half-interested houses.
Borrowing money from his father and a bank, Carson and family left for New York, where he joined the Friars Club and gradually repaired a shattered reputation with his deft roasting of such sharp-tongued colleagues as Jack E. Leonard. Hired by ABC to handle Who Do You Trust?, he built the whimsical quiz show into the network’s biggest daytime attraction. During the evening, he occasionally filled in for Jack Paar, who was then hosting The Tonight Show over at NBC. Admiring his quick, offhanded approach to comedy, the networks offered Carson starring roles in various sitcoms, but he always declined and held on to his “secure” position with Who Do You Trust? But as Paar began to publicly reaffirm his intentions to leave The Tonight ShowM — and mentioned Johnny on the air as a possible successor — NBC redoubled its efforts to lure Carson away from ABC. He finally gave in to their entreaties and signed on with a first-year salary of approximately $100,000. On October 1st, 1962, at 11:15 p.m., Groucho Marx introduced Johnny Carson as the moderator of The Tonight Show, and a new era in television, and comedy, was born.
Johnny’s guests that inaugural evening were Joan Crawford, Tony Bennett, Mel Brooks and Rudy Vallee, and the hand was under the direction of Skitch Henderson, with Doc Severinsen on trumpet. Ed McMahon, of course, was the announcer and resident straight man, duplicating his earlier duties on Who Do You Trust?
The New York Times bestowed a favorable review, the writer noting that, “at the onset he [Carson] said he was not going to describe every guest as an old and dear friend, an indication of a refreshing attitude against prevalent show business hokum.” In summation, the Times ruled that his “healthy independence” could “wear very well.”
The same could not be said for Carson’s marriages. His first had produced three sons — Chris, Ricky and Cory — but little lasting happiness. As his star ascended, a yearlong separation from Jody sank into eventual divorce in 1963. In August of that year, Johnny was remarried to Joanne Copeland, 30, a vivacious, dark-haired actress that he had met briefly years earlier. A former airline stewardess, she was currently appearing on a daytime TV program called Video Village. The couple separated seven years later, and was divorced in June 1972. That August, Carson made the surprise announcement during the tenth anniversary party for The Tonight Show that he had secretly wed divorced ex-model Joanna Holland that afternoon. The celebration took place in Los Angeles, and the New York-based Tonight Show, after having made regular “trips” to the West Coast during the latter part of the decade, soon after relocated permanently in California.
The ever-faithful Ed McMahon left his wife of twenty-seven years and four children to follow the show to L.A., and in short order his marriage was dissolved. He has since remarried.
Professionally, the years since have been relatively peaceful and prosperous ones (insiders estimate that Carson now banks as much as $4 million per annum for his services), although there have been occasional storms, such as Johnny’s ire at being preempted by night football games; or his suit against a toilet manufacturer to prevent the production of a portable “Here’s Johnny!” commode; or his lingering threats to leave The Tonight Show, first expressed in 1967 after NBC allegedly violated his contract by showing reruns of the program during an AFTRA strike.
Carson himself has become a kingpin of our popular culture, and The Tonight Show is a kinetic icon for adults of all ages. His conversational comedic style, which he acknowledges as having been shaped by such early heroes as Jack Benny, Bob Hope and George Burns, has become the very paradigm of nonchalant patter for every aspiring young stand-up or sit-down wit.
As a fashion plate, he has easily eclipsed such seminal Tinsel Town trend setters as Fred Astaire, Adolphe Menjou and Cesar Romero with his smart, ungarish taste in sportswear. When he adopted the turtleneck sweater as a respectable alternative to a shirt and tie, millions of American men responded in kind. His Johnny Carson Apparel, Inc., formed in 1970 in conjunction with the Hart, Schaffner & Marx Company, continues to thrive. Likewise, since wife Joanna convinced him to stop tinting his hair and let the silver shine through, the look has been universally embraced as the hallmark of seasoned suavity.
But behind his affecting raiment and distinguished visage, the private Johnny Carson retains the same intensely reticent disposition he has carried all his life. So when his puckish off-camera side does surface, it sometimes catches even his oldest associates completely off guard.
“I’m always impressed with how funny he can be off-camera,” admits veteran Tonight Show writer Pat McCormick. “One time I went into the Polo Lounge [in the Beverly Hills Hotel] with him, and the guy at the door insisted that he wear a tie before he could enter. So he went off to his room and put on a tie, but took off his shoes and socks. I was amazed. And there was no rule in the place about shoes and socks, so he just walked in, sat down and put his bare feet up on the table. The guy at the door was stunned. It was a hilarious night.”
A few practical jokes notwithstanding, Carson is a man profoundly uncomfortable with his own emotions, and unable to express his pain, insecurity and deep caring without considerable difficulty. A frequent giver of generous, thoughtful gifts, his magnanimity is one manifestation of his submerged sensitivity, but sometimes such distanced overtures to others simply do not suffice.
“They were changing the sun on the Shubert Theater across the street and we spent most of the time looking out the window at that and commenting about it,” says Ed McMahon, recalling the day in 1957 when Carson interviewed him for the announcer’s job on Who Do You Trust? “We spent five minutes together, and then he said, ‘Well, thanks a lot, Ed, for coming up. I appreciate it.’
“I walked out and I was convinced I had blown the job. I figured he didn’t like me; I’m not the type he wants. A couple of weeks later a guy calls me on the phone and says, ‘When you start Monday . . . And I said, ‘What?’ Everybody assumed I knew I had been hired!”
“Johnny has a very strong shyness,” McMahon explains. “I think he would love to have hired me without meeting me, because that meant getting out of his shy character and into being Johnny Carson, and that’s something that he has to turn on.”
Usually, Carson hides behind precise, dispassionate regimen, and expects others to understand.
“When you never hear anything from him, you’re doing a great job,” says McMahon, “because he doesn’t constantly send you laudatory phrases or gestures. It’s just assumed you’re doing a good job, or you wouldn’t be there. And we have the kind of friendship where we don’t have to keep saying to each other, ‘I’m your friend.’
“On the show he likes efficiency. It’s all done in a pattern. I mean, I psych myself up at a quarter after five every night and I walk into his office to see him. Everything is geared so that he and I will see each other and chat for five to seven minutes each day beforehand. And will just kind of ramble — we never talk about the show; I never hear the monologue — until I leave him at twenty-three after five to go down and do a five-minute warmup with the audience. And I usually leave his office laughing.
“He has great difficultly in getting his emotions of love and warmth out,” McMahon confides. “I’ll tell you a story I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone before, that explains a lot about the man and our relationship.
“One night after the show about ten years ago, he was so nervous he was chainsmoking cigarettes, and he said, ‘C’mon, I want to talk with you,’ which was very unusual. It was the last night of our performance in Hollywood, back when we were based in New York and used to come out a few times a year. So I said to myself, ‘What the hell is this? “He said, ‘Let’s go outside.’ So we went outside the studio to a quiet room. And then we went into another/I> room, and he lit another cigarette. And he said, ‘I have something I went to tell you.’ I thought. ‘Jeeze, this is it. I’m getting the ax. He couldn’t bring himself to tell me before.’
“And finally he says, ‘I just want to tell you that I know what you’re doing; I know what you’re doing. I know you’re helping me out there. I know what a supportive person you are. I know that you are . . .’
“He was trying to pay me a compliment but he was having the greatest agony in doing it. I was in tears, and I left the room and I started running down the hallway at NBC. He came out after me and over my shoulder I could hear him yelling, and I looked and saw that he was crying too. And his final words to me were: ‘You see, goddamnit! You can’t take a compliment any better than I can!'”
It is sunny but cool on the November morning that I arrive at Carson’s Bel Air mansion. Before admitting me, a beefy guard at the front gate punches the button on the outdoor intercom and confirms my appointment. The expansive compound consists of a large, modernart-filled ranch house and a smaller two-story building that contains Johnny’s private study and gym, the two adjacent structures flanked by a kidney-shaped swimming pool, tennis courts and lush, manicured grounds. Barefooted and dressed in tennis whites, Johnny greets me at the front door of his study with an iron grip of my hand and then sits me down inside on a long couch amid his many mementos, among them a prominently displayed photo of himself with Hubert Humphrey.
“It’s about time we spoke in person,” he says with a businesslike smile, alluding to the months of phone conversations that preceded our meeting. Up close, his strong, flinty features are lined and accented with a salt-and-pepper stubble. The eyes are bluegreen and piercing, and his frame is trim, muscular and agile. Obviously tense, he drums his fingers, taps his feet and rises from his chair opposite me at measured intervals to pace in a tight circle and light another Pall Mall — but his steely eyes remain fixed on mine with nary a dart or a flutter. During our initial head-to-head exchange (and a followup session a week later at The Pierre in Manhattan), his manner is affable but resolute. Clearly, he sees our talk essentially as a task, but one to which he is determined to lend a cordial, relaxed air. (After the first interview he is markedly becalmed and gregarious, as if a burden has been lifted from him.)
That night, I stand on the sidelines in Studio I on NBC’s sprawling Burbank lot as bespectacled executive producer Freddie de Cordova warms up the audience for a Wednesday installment of The Tonight Show that features guests F. Lee Bailey and Andy Williams. De Cordova baits the anxious crowd, toying with their dismay at the prospect of an absentee Carson, and then proclaims, to elated cheers, that Johnny will indeed be hosting tonight: “. . . and we’re just as surprised as you are!”
Big Ed McMahon hurries out to detail the ground rules of audience participation, consisting mainly of repeated pleas for wild applause for whatever may ensue. A gaudily attired Doc Severinsen cranks up the brassy theme song as McMahon barks his intro, and then Ed intones the prayerlike “Heeeerrrrrrre’s JOHNNY!”
The white-suited star strolls out through the parted curtains that hang between his tiny desk and the bandstand, flashing a winning grin and clicking into his time-honored repertoire of nervous ticks: the craning of the neck, the smoothing of the tie, etc.
Carson’s in high spirits and his monologue flows out briskly to an enthusiastic reception; he winks to the cameramen and jokes easily with the tiered throng before him. It’s another round of The Tonight Show, the sight all too familiar, yet still strangely fascinating, and every mechanism in this curious little universe is in its place and operating like clockwork.
Johnny titters his last opening quip with habitual panache, and the wholesome, fresh-laced audience settles back as if in church for a live dose of the safe, comfortable ritual. He signals to the band and winds up his golf swing as the booming music segues into a commercial break, but tonight Johnny draws out the gesture just a few seconds longer than usual, carefully watching his monitor for the station break as he delivers aloud, robust “Ahhhhhhhhhhh — shit!”
[Smiling] I gotta tell you from the start, I don’t know anything about comedy.
[Laughing] Oh? Well, I don’t know about that.
I don’t know many people who do, strangely enough.
A lot of comedians, comics and humorists prefer to be funny than to talk about being funny.
Yeah, because you always end up being pedantic or really unctuous. If you try to analyze a joke and dissect it, take it apart — it’s no longer funny. Unfortunately when you talk about humor, comedy, it’s so relative. That’s the big problem. The worst thing you can say about anybody is that he has no sense of humor. That’s the crusher — all things; the girl says to the guy, “You have no sense of humor.”
But everyone has a sense of humor. A lot of things that some people find funny, other people just don’t find funny, so that is the problem for comedians or people who do comedy — just trying to find some kind of common denominator if there is such a thing, or just reach as many people as you can. But it’s a very hairy problem. That’s why you have somebody who will say, “Gee, I think Laurel and Hardy are wonderful,” and somebody else will say, “They stink, I don’t understand them.”
They might be put off for instance, by the pratfalls of buffoonery, one shoving the other.
That’s the big problem when you start discussing comedy. When you say, “What is funny?” I don’t know. It sounds like a copout, but l don’t really know until I go out and do it — and I just hear the laughter. I like Laurel and Hardy, but I don’t see them just as pratfall comedians. If you study Laurel and Hardy, it’s a very, very special relationship. Books have been written on it. At times they are very polite, they are very protective of each other. Whenever Ollie introduces Stan, he says [doing an effective Oliver Hardy imitation], “This is my good friend, Mr Laurel.”
He’ll be very courtly.
[Nodding] Very courtly manners. But . . . and then when they go at each other, it’s “Stanley!” and so forth. There’s a wonderful relationship between the two of them. I think a lot of their humor is very good satire, a lot of it’s slapstick, but . . . I keep looking at that pillow over there [indicating an embroidered pillow on a nearby couch].
[Reading the pillow’s needlepoint axiom] It’s all in the timing.
Yes, it’s all in the timing, as far as I’m concerned. Humor is so much timing, and that’s why, as we talk here for reproduction in print, I know that you can never make that transference from the audio sound of a joke or delivery, with all the nuances, to paper. That’s why some funny people who can write very well — for example, S.J. Perelman’s a good writer; H. Allen Smith had a brief flurry where he was funny — never fared too well when they tried to do it in person.
I think there is a noticeable shift in the comedic climate from time to time in this country. When you were writing that humor column back in Norfolk high school, what was the climate?
I emulated a lot of people when I first started. I think everybody, when they first find out they can get laughs as a kid, they steal deliveries, steal the jokes that are kind of current at that time. I was an admirer of Fred Allen, Jack Benny, all the radio comedians in that day, and your humor takes on their realities because you haven’t developed your own style yet.
I was writing jokes more or less in the style of a Bob Hope. Picture jokes of that style, because I’d listen to him. And then sometimes I would copy Fred Allen. I loved Fred Allen because he was one of the true natural wits, a man who could sit around and say amusing things and not make jokes. There are a lot of good deliverers and there are a lot of good stylists, but the genuine wits are few. There’s that old cliche that you hear over and over again: that a comic says funny things and a comedian says things funny.
But Fred Allen, to take a specific example, was a man who wrote very funny. I remember I used to have a few letters from him, and in his letters he would really take time — he was a laborious kind of writer — to write amusing things.
Well, Fred Allen was one of the great wits, but he was very critical of TV throughout his career, even when he was on TV.
I think television, when Fred was alive, was so basically new that maybe he didn’t even really see the possibilities in it. And Fred was not a particularly attractive man, in that he was kind of dour-faced. His sense of humor had more appeal than his appearance, and he sensed that. I think Fred would be much more acceptable nowadays, especially his cynical observations of what the hell is going on. He was ahead of his time in a lot of things he did.
He did a lot of satire, a lot of social commentary, and it was interesting, because he and Milton Berle coexisted on TV, around the same time that TVs were owned mostly by well-to-do people and not the broad-based radio audiences they’d both previously known. Berle was very big on using TV in a very flamboyant way with relatively big productions and outlandish pratfalls, but Allen remained a true wit in a simple setting.
Sure. Fred Allen’s a verbal comedian and Milton is a physical comedian. I can tell you a joke that Fred Allen did about Milton Berle when Berle, at the time, was on television on Tuesday nights; that was the big night, and people would stop in at bars to watch The Milton Berle Show. Fred was still on the radio at the time, and I remember a bit where Fred’s wife, Portland, came on and said to Fred that Milton had missed his television show Tuesday night because he had the flu. Fred said something like [mimicking Allen’s dry, nasal delivery], “I don’t know how Milton could get sick. He’s got enough mold on his jokes to make his own penicillin.” That’s a witty joke.
Well, it’s very much to the point, too. Whereas with Allen’s satire and social commentary, there was always an immediacy to what he was saying, Berle was immersed in a tradition of gag lines and vaudeville immersed in slapstick.
[Smiling] But of course, Fred was a juggler, you know, in vaudeville. He worked first as Freddie James, World’s Worst Juggler. He later became a writer and a wit. He wrote a good deal of the shows himself; I think Fred Allen would have a resurgence if he were still around.
Speaking of Fred Allen and his work as a juggler, you worked a Midwestern circuit as a magician when you were a young man. Did you ever read and employ comic tools in your act, like a Bob Orben-type book of patter?
Oh, sure, sure. And Orben’s still in business, writing funny stuff for magicians. I think when you’re a kid, you look at all that stuff. I remember buying some Fun Master gag files at one time. Then you realize very quickly that most of it is stock type of humor. But until you learn to write what you can do and what works for you, you grab a little of this and a little of that.
My magic really became comedy. I played it more for laughs. I did all the sucker type of tricks with the audience, doing jokes along with them.
Humor also serves as a convenient form of distraction to help carry the magic off.
[Grinning] Oh God, you’re taking me back. Yeah, the trick would go wrong, or it wouldn’t function right. The use of humor as a counterbalance or a saving device became a matter of experimentation.
You’ve always been good at working with situations where things don’t go right, and that’s more advantageous to you than if they did go right.
I do a lot of reaction type of comedy I guess. You react to the situation. You play off what is happening, trying to make something out of a disaster. People love to see if you’re going to get out of it.
I think that one of the things that is the most innovative about The Tonight Show is the way that you work with the camera. The camera and, as a result, the audience become accomplices or conspirators with you. I think about George Burns and Jack Benny referring to the camera and using the camera as sort of a confidant, but that was always in a scripted context. You’ve been very successful with instilling a kind of vitality in the camera as a presence, to where we feel a sense of intimacy.
Well, television is an intimate medium. I’m not conscious when I use the camera. I know it’s there. I use it like another person and, do a reaction at it — lift an eyebrow or shrug or whatever. I’m conscious of it, but I’m not conscious of it.
There is a real sense of . . . naturalness in the way you work with the camera that makes the air of intimacy so convincing.
And I think the director, Bobby Quinn, who’s worked with us for many years, can almost read if I’m going to do a reaction to what is happening. So I will know that maybe this camera is going to be up and I can react to the situation and do a “look” and then go back to what I was doing.
The Tonight Show is one of the few places on television where one can see stars, prominent people, and you’ll get a glimpse behind their public personas.
Sometimes you cannot penetrate them. You know they will do what they want to do. You try to break through and get them maybe a little off guard and have some fun, because otherwise it becomes [stiffly], “Tell us about your latest movie,” and all of those obligator questions you have to ask occasionally.
It’s easy to be socially relevant. I could go in at five tonight and say, “Give me four guests, give me the heads of the prisons of California and give me a politician and give me some psychiatrists and we’ll just discuss what happened in Guyana.” And you can sit there and discuss people in cults and get very heavy, and everybody will say, “Oh, that’s very socially relevant.”
That’s a talk show, but that’s not what I do. I’m an entertainer, and I always look at myself as an entertainer. So it has bothered me for a while when we would get little flak from the critics saying we’re not doing anything “deep.” That’s not the idea.
Yet, there is a topicality to your show. You’ll come up with witty jokes — not gags — about Watergate, Camp David, drugs, changing sexual mores . . .
I think some of the material we’ve done on political things is some of the best material on the air. And it does get a strong reaction — especially in the political arena. We sense the mood of the country very quickly.
For example, I remember when Agnew was first selected as vice-president, it was easy to do jokes about him; nobody knew who he was, and he was good fodder for material. Then, when Agnew became the voice of so-called Middle America, all of a sudden the jokes were not particularly funny. When he fell into disfavor, then again you found out that the people would buy the caustic material. Same thing with Nixon.
To take another example: when Wilbur Mills was in trouble with the infamous Fanne Foxe and the Tidal Basin thing, it was funny until people found out he was an alcoholic. And then you knew immediately to stay away from it, because you were taking advantage of someone after the man came out and admitted it.
Has there ever been a joke you felt uncomfortable doing, either at the time or in retrospect?
NBC used to come to me years ago. They wanted to see the monologue before the show, and I said, “No, I can’t do that.” I can’t have somebody sitting up in an office and making capricious judgments on what he thinks is funny or not funny. I said, “You’re going to have to trust my judgment,” and they have. And nobody sees the monologue outside of the writers and myself; they give me the stuff, and I add to it or edit it, and put it together. Nobody sees it until it’s done. And I don’t think in seventeen years there have been more than one or two instances where something might have been cut.
Have there ever been any specific skits that you wanted to get on the air, but which you later thought better of?
We had a thing we wanted to do once on Siamese twins, and it bordered on the uncomfortable, because we figured people would say, well, it’s a physical handicap. Although the material was funny, we might have offended somebody. Yet, it’s impossible to do humor without offending somebody.
If I do a joke about President Carter, people are going to get angry. If I do a joke about Amy Carter, or if I do a joke about Nixon, or if I do say something about Bert Lance, like when he was in trouble, certain people are going to get angry. But otherwise, you keep saying, “It’s so hot that . . .” or, “My wife is so fat that . . .” and you can’t really do that if you’re going to say anything and make some point.
You’ve always had a kind of iconoclastic flair in your humor, even going back to when you were working on the radio in Omaha. In Kenneth Tynan’s [1978] piece in the New Yorker, he wrote about these formatted, prerecorded interviews you would receive at the station and then mischievously distort.
I know what you’re talking about, and I loved that. In the old radio days, the record companies would send out these prepared interviews and they would send you a script so you could interview the recording artist. You’d play the Patti Page tape and say, “Gee, it’s nice to have you here today, Patti,” and she’d say, “Thank you for inviting me tonight; it’s nice to be here.” Then the next question would be, “When did you first start singing?” And the taped reply would be, “Well, I think I was about ten years old, and I was in a church play or something.”
So I just wrote my own questions, and I’d say, “I understand that you hit the juice pretty good and you’ve been known to really get drunk pretty often. When did that start?” Then they’d play the cut, and she’d say, “Well, I think I was about ten years old, and I was in a church play . . .” and it was wonderful. Just these insane, wild, provocative questions, and then the engineer would play this innocent track with the prerecorded reply. They quit sending them to us very soon. I’ve always liked irreverence.
I recall watching Who Do You Trust? when I was a young kid, and there was always a sharp wit there, in the same way, in the same way there was on Groucho Marx’ show. You’ve always tried to expand the boundaries of whatever format you were in.
I think I have to. Who Do You Trust? wasn’t really a quiz show. The quiz at the end was just a device to bring people on and have some fun. It was a la Groucho. I’ve always liked that kind of humor.
You also did a television show called Earn Your Vacation in 1954.
God, that goes back, originally, to radio in the Fifties. People came on the show to win a trip. The people came on, and I’d do the comedy interview and then play the game. That was more a game show because there was a big prize involved. Who Do You Trust? was really [Laughter] . . . I don’t even know what the hell the point of the game was.
What single person do you admire most or emulate to some extent? A lot of people say that you were very close to Jack Benny and that he was instrumental in helping you get going on TV.
We were good friends. Jack, yes, I admired very much. Fred Allen was another one. Jack was really one hell of an actor in playing a role, which I admired. If you had followed that show at all and you could write, you could almost write it yourself. The characters were so well identified and well established that it was wonderful and unique.
He was always the target of the humor, and then in reaction he would build up sort of a vocabulary of facial quips in the same way that you have a familiar wink or a look of exasperation.
Yes, that image of put-upon frustration. Jack was very smart. He played off of his cast; they would put him down, and he would react. He was, basically a reacting type of comedy character and it wasn’t important to him who got the laughs on the show. The show was the thing. It was never the Don Wilson Show or the Dennis Day Show even though they might get tremendous laughs. It was always The Jack Benny Show. That’s important, because if the show is working, it’s yours.
You should try to help the guests be as good as they can be, because the better the guest is, the better I’ll be. I’ve got Buck Henry on tonight. I always look forward to having Buck on because I know we’ll start throwing things around, and we don’t really know where it’s going, and all of a sudden we’re into something and it’s good. Somebody like Buck Henry, who thinks funny and has got a rather bizarre sense of humor, brings out the craziness in me. Some of the best moments are times like that.
Who else is a favorite of yours?
Well, the problem is, if I started naming favorites, guys are going to call me tomorrow and say, “How come you didn’t mention my name?” There are a lot of people that work in different ways. I like to have [Buddy] Hackett on. Hackett is a self-starter. [Bob] Newhart, to me, can be very funny. Carl Reiner is fun to sit and verbalize with, because things sometimes will just take off. When Mel Brooks is on I sometimes start doing things I wouldn’t otherwise even think of doing.
The outrageous moments on the show are the most memorable.
Many of them are wonderful low humor. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with low humor if you do it well. Low humor can be very effective. I can sit and talk with a Buck Henry and it can be intelligent and funny. Then I can still get up — if I want to — and do a sketch that is a complete knockabout type of thing — whether it’s Art Fern doing the Tea Time Movie — and get away with playing both ends of that spectrum. The audience will buy it. In other words, you can do a complete burlesque thing, low burlesque comedy, which you don’t see much anymore, and then turn around and still do a stand-up routine or a sit-down exchange that has a certain air of sophistication.
I think we really stole the name of the Mighty Carson Art Players, by the way, from Fred Allen. Fred Allen used to do the Mighty Allen Art Players.
Whatever you’re doing, belief is never suspended. Whether it’s skits or banter or characterizations, everything retains an impromptu quality.
And yet some of these things I started putting together years ago. The old lady, the Aunt Blabby character, I had done years ago in Omaha. I did her on local television back there, and she just evolved over a period of time. Art Fern, the Tea Time Movie host, grew out of a local slickster salesman on TV he had a little pencil mustache and a very bad toupee that looked like it had been painted on his head. It’s just a takeoff on the guys out here in California who do their own selling, whether they’re selling the “Miracle Vegetable Cutter” or whatever, and he just became a good running character.
The character I’ve been doing lately, Floyd Turbo — he’s the epitome of the redneck ignoramus, and he always takes the “prohunting” or “pro-Concorde” stance, I’m still working with Turbo. I find things each week when I go out to do it that I throw in: his gestures at the wrong time, his not knowing where he’s supposed to be, his feeble attempts at humor, his talks about things he doesn’t quite understand. But usually it starts out as a one-time shot.
When we have a sketch, we get, like, one run-through and that’s it. And I like it better that way because it’s Parkinson’s Law that if you’ve got a week to get ready, it takes you a week, and if you’ve got a day to get ready, it takes a day.
In the early days, in that small-screen format, TV was trying to evince a flamboyance that would rival what was being done on the wide screen. Yet The Tonight Show, in its unique comedy context, is way simple, completely unadorned, not at all like a conventional variety show.
The gingerbread doesn’t help you much. When NBC put on NBC Follies years ago, they spent a lot of money building a proscenium stage, and they had these girls coming down in Ziegfeld-like costumes, and it didn’t work because that essentially is Broadway and Hollywood — and TV is still an intimate type of thing, basically.
Take the obligatory dance numbers they have in Broadway or variety stage shows. You see twenty dancers come out with a huge production number. It’s really a filler to get ready for the next sketch or whatever. TV doesn’t need that.
Ed Wynn told me years ago about girls on television; he said [imitating Wynn], “What’s sexy about a three-inch girl?” The point he was making was that when you see them on Broadway and they come down onstage and they’re bigger than life, that’s one thing. When you see them on television, it’s often pointless and unimaginative.
You’ve talked to me in the past about “pure television.” What is pure television?
To me, it’s still the performance on TV that is most important. The personality is more important than all of the dance numbers and the big production things. I always thought those things have been kind of lost on television, because they ignore the automatic focus that TV provides.
But I got the feeling, even if you take all that glitter away and pare it down to a spare sitcom or variety format, it’s still not the kind of pure television that you were talking about.
Well, pure television to me is also immediacy. That’s why I don’t like to do The Tonight Show a week or two in advance, like a lot of shows do. I like to be able to go out tonight and talk about what’s happening today. So the immediacy of doing this kind of show, I think, has a certain value in it. People know it’s happening right now.
Sure, we’re delayed on tape, but we don’t edit the show; we don’t shoot two hours and edit it down. When Saturday Night Live says, “Live, from New York!” it’s live in the East but it’s not live out here. Doing it the same day on tape is exactly the same thing as doing it live.
In both programs there’s also the element of risk.
And I think that’s a part of pure television. We don’t know on any given night how it’s going to go. You get an immediate feedback from the audience on what you’ve done, and if it all falls together, it’s a great feeling. If you’ve had troubles, you say, “Okay, there’s tomorrow night.” Every night cannot be a winner. Although I don’t do it five nights a week anymore — I’m doing it four this week — there’s no way you can go out and have everything be of high quality.
You don’t stop the tape even when people are being off-color or whatever. You might bleep it out, but people can see that things were getting out of hand.
Yeah, I think there’s that aura of “What’s going to happen? How are they going to get out of this? This is not going well.” That, to me, is what television started out to be. Now, mainly, it’s a device for screening movies or situation comedies with canned laughter. And The Tonight Show, or shows like it, I think — if they all went off the air, it would be too bad for television.
Obviously, you don’t care for canned laughter.
I never liked . . . excuse me, I’m going to sneeze here. Aha-choo! Sorry, — I wish that sneeze could’ve been funnier, but then it probably would have been prerehearsed and on videotape.
But I never really liked canned laughter, although there are places for it. But you really have to know how to use it. There is a truth that laughter begets laughter to a certain extent, but most shows use it so horrendously. Pretty soon there’s no distinction between what really deserves a laugh and what doesn’t.
But it can help a show, I think, if it’s done well. Jack Benny used to use it so well that people didn’t even know he used it. I once saw Jack go out and do a monologue to a set of empty seats; there was nobody there except a couple of stagehands. It was a filmed show. And Jack walked out and said “Good evening” and looked at the audience — there’s no audience there — and he does his joke, and he paused because he knew exactly when he should.
Are there any sitcoms that you enjoy?
Oh, I think the writing in All in the Family and the old Mary Tyler Moore and Maude shows was some of the best writing that was ever done on television. I think there are more laughs in an All in the Family show than there are in an evening on Broadway.
People forget that. You go to see a Broadway play that was supposed to be a comedy and you come out and you say, “What are they talking about? It wasn’t that funny.” Then you sit down and watch an All in the Family episode or Mary Tyler Moore and it’s wonderful humor. Some of the stuff was superb.
First of all, I think that people have to like the people that make them laugh. I think it’s so important. They have to like or identify with the characters. The thing that made All in the Family good was that you had wonderful people doing it. You had Carroll O’Connor, Jean Stapleton and Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers. The rapport that they all had together was strong and they fleshed out the characters so well — as they did on the Mary Tyler Moore show. They all had this wonderful interplay, they all had their moments, and they all flattered each other, complemented each other. You don’t get that on most of the shows. Those are few and far between.
These days, comic actors compete with each other too much I think.
Yeah, everybody does. In some of the stuff I see, the kids are funny, the housekeeper is funny, the garbage man comes on and he’s funny. Everybody is throwing funny things around, but there are no convincing relationships between the characters.
Well, in the first place, you don’t really give a shit. You don’t know these people, so you don’t care. Writers have just written jokes for them.
Sometimes people say that there’s a hot-seat quality to sitting next to you on The Tonight Show. How do you feel about that?
I don’t know. A lot of people have never been on before. They’ve been watching the show for years and now they find themselves sitting there in a position that they’ve always been watching. I can understand why that would make you feel uncomfortable. Hell, if I went on somebody else’s show and sat there, I could be uncomfortable, because, in a way, the guy behind the microphone has got the bat. He’s in charge.
I don’t think I’ve been guilty of making people feel awkward. If they feel uncomfortable, I don’t think it’s because of the way I’ve handled them; I certainly don’t want them to be, because it doesn’t work for me.
Weren’t you on The Dick Cavett Show?
I did a show with Dick Cavett, and I did ninety minutes with David Frost once, and I felt a little awkward. I was not completely in control. I was not in charge there. When somebody else steps out of that role and into another role, they are not in command, and the guy usually behind the desk is supposed to be in command of the situation. So I think that makes for a little awkwardness.
When I see you helping guests through the show who are very nervous or even drunk, and then, in some cases, you’ll go to a commercial, and then the guest will discreetly take his leave, it reminds me of one of your big breaks — when you had to fill in on the old Red Skelton Show after he had an accident. He is one comedian that I can think of whose comedy has always had a consistently life-affirming tone. And very kindly, especially in his pantomimes when he’s depicting old people, like his famous sketch of the old man watching the parade.
I like to work with elderly people and children. I don’t know why. I respect older people. I like working with kids. Maybe it’s the vulnerability of them. There’s a charm about older people that sometimes is childlike, and I enjoy them because, first of all, they can say anything they want to, which is just great. Age gives you a leg up on what you can say, because you don’t have to account to anybody. You’ve lived your life and earned the right to sound off.
They’ll just say, “Oh, well screw that, I don’t like that, that’s a lot of shit!” And they lay it right out.
Critics, at the same time, have said that you have a schoolboy quality, a puckishness that isn’t seen too often on TV.
[Intrigued] I suppose that’s only because of the face. I’ve never had a particularly old-looking face. Even when I was thirty or thirty-five, I looked like I was twenty-five. That may be changing rapidly now. But if I looked different, you probably wouldn’t have that attitude. Or maybe it’s because I was born in the Midwest; you know, Mel Brooks calls me “Supergentile,” “SuperWASP,” and maybe it’s that particular look, but that’s just what I am.
Well, what was your first exposure to something funny while growing up?
[Very pensive] Gee, that’s tough. I’ve never really thought about that. I was always involved, even in grade school, in school plays or just screwing up or being silly in front of an audience. Maybe it was a self-defense type of thing, but I can remember doing that clear into high school.
I remember once in grade school — this won’t sound funny now, but I thought it was very funny then — we had to do a fifty-word speech or a hundred-word speech on dogs. I can still remember it, and I got up and just recited names of dogs. It’s not funny now, but at that time it was successfully silly. I was in all the school plays in junior high school, wrote a column for the school paper in high school, called “Carson’s Corn.” [Laughing] Do you believe that? Yeah, I did all the stuff for the high school annual.
Did you have any exposure to vaudeville?
Not vaudeville in terms of the Keith circuit or anything like that. I would go down to Omaha and see all the stage shows. I can remember touring shows coming through the Midwest, what they called tent shows, and I was fascinated. It would be the repertory company that would come around, maybe they’d call it chautauqua in those days. I remember going down to Omaha and sitting on wooden benches for a dime, and they would do a comedy; next night it would be a drama with a cornball villain and so forth.
Was there anyone in particular that impressed you? Stuck in your mind?
There were no stars or names as such; they were just touring groups of actors making ten bucks a week or something. But to me, the fascination of getting up and putting on a costume or makeup, even in high school, to be in a play where you’re actually putting makeup on your face — it made you different. I mean the kids knew, hey, you were a professional, you’re putting makeup on. You were different from other people. You were up on the stage and they were sitting down here, and there’s a certain, I don’t know if you want to call it . . . power, but it makes you different. That’s why a lot of performers sometimes are good in front of an audience and not particularly good on a one-to-one relationship.
I always felt that when you succeeded Steve Allen and Jack Paar as The Tonight Show host, you altered the show to suit your personality. It had to be as different as it made you feel.
[Solemn] I remember when Paar was on there, people said, “Nobody will ever replace Paar.” Well, that’s true; Paar was Paar. I didn’t go in to replace Paar. And I originally turned The Tonight Show down when they offered it to me, when I was doing that daytime show and I was getting pretty good money for it. It was comfortable and it was easy. I said [fearfully], “I’ve got to follow this emotional, crazy man — who had his own appeal to people because of his vulnerability and his outbursts?” It worked great for him. I realized that I had to go in and do what I did, whatever it was, and the audience would either accept me or they wouldn’t. And when I give this thing up, somebody will come along and do it. They’ll discover somebody else.
Friends of yours have said that you’ll still be there in 1985.
I doubt that. I don’t think so. We’re going on seventeen years. I don’t want to sit there when I’m an old man. I’m fifty-three now; I don’t feel anywhere near fifty-three, but I don’t envision sitting there in my sixties. I think that would be wrong.
You have become — and this is just a fact — so much a part of this culture. If you weren’t there, I suspect there would be a real gap. This sounds very sentimental, but, if there’s nothing going on on a weeknight, you’re home and there’s very little to look forward to, you can always turn on The Tonight Show and see you.
[Long pause] That’s flattering. I think one of the things is that we’re about the only show that does day-to-day humor. There’s no other show that does it. Saturday Night Live is on three times a month; they do sketches. The monologue, for example, to me is a very integral part of the show. Being out there every night, it’s the only show that I know of on television where anybody is commenting on what’s going on in the country every single day.
But why do you think people feel so comfortable with you?
I can’t analyze that. I really can’t. I just do what I do. People ask me, “How do you analyze that you’ve stayed on seventeen years and the competition has dropped off?” See, either way you answer that, you end up sounding like a schmuck.
If you say, “Well, obviously I do a much better job than they do,” or say, “I’m more talented,” then people say, “You egotistical bastard!”
If, on the other hand, you play Harry Humble and say, “Gee, I don’t know,” then that sounds idiotic, too. So no matter what you say, people say, “Aw, come on now.”
I don’t try to shoot for an average audience. I do the things I like to do, and I think I’ve learned what people will accept from me. That’s just an intuitive thing.
In the past you’ve made remarks that seemed critical of Dick Cavett.
Yeah, I didn’t mean that. It sounded, when it came out, as a put-down, and I didn’t mean it to be. I’m fond of Dick and I know him well, and I think he’s a bright, amusing guy, but I’ve often wondered if Dick wants to be an entertainer or a talk show host.
People say, “What’s the difference between you and Mike Douglas and, say, a Merv Griffin and so forth — you’re all doing the same show.” And I’ll say, “Well, there’s one difference,” and this again is not being patronizing, but I go out on concerts, have for fifteen sworn, I play Las Vegas every year. I do a stand-up act. The other people don’t. I’m basically a professional comedian and it doesn’t bother me to say that.
I always had the feeling that it bothered Cavett to say he’s a professional comedian. I don’t know why. There’s nothing wrong with being a comedian. But that word comic or comedian bothered him. Like he’d rather be known as a wit or as a humorist.
Some people see being a comedian as lowbrow.
[Riled] Baloney. Jack Benny was a comedian. Jimmy Durante, Fred Allen and Skelton — all comedians. What’s wrong with being a comedian? It’s not lowbrow.
The Tonight Show has always been a major vehicle for new comedians. In that respect, there’s nothing else like it on the air.
Because I realize that is the hardest type of entertaining to do — to stand by yourself and make people laugh. And anybody who says anything different is crazy. You can ask George Burns, you can ask any of the people who “stand.” That’s a lonely type of existence to get out there, one on one, and you don’t have any instrument, and you’re not dancing, and you’re not singing the latest hits. That is a tough way to make a dollar. It’s lonely; you’ve only got yourself.
Why do you think that you’re such a staunch supporter of these new comedians and no one else really does it?
They have ’em on their shows . . .
Not to the extent that you do.
Well, because it’s a hard commodity to find, first of all. There’s thousands of singers who can come out and sing a song. There are, however, not many young comedians who can come out and do six, seven, eight minutes. And it’s fun to see it when they do come on and hit and go on to other things.
Joan Rivers, Flip Wilson and a lot of them are working now. Freddie Prinze, before he shot himself; and Johnny Yune is a new young comedian who’s come on who I think is going to be good. It’s fun to watch that happen.
Do you offer advice or counsel to these people before or afterward?
If they ask. If I feel they will take it well, because I don’t want to be patronizing. But most of them know. They appreciate it. I mean, if somebody came to me when I was starting and said, “Hey, this would work for you,” I’d appreciate it.
Freddie Prinze was so young when he came on the show and, prior to his appearancees, he hadn’t had a tremendous impact. Did you offer him any advice before or afterward?
Only once did I offer him some advice, and he asked me. He was going to do a joke where he was going to say “fuck,” and he said “What do you think?”
I said, “You’re too young to get away with it. Jack Benny could come on, even though it was a mixed adult group, and do it, and the shock value would be funny. If you do it, they’re going to resent it.”
Did he do it?
No, he didn’t do it.
Do you have any other perceptions about Freddie and the way he was?
I didn’t know him well. I would guess it was too much, too fast, too soon. He came out of a minority background — from nothing and being Puerto Rican and in the minority, and then all of a sudden having this tremendous surge of popularity, it’s tough to handle. The money is there, the girls are there, the hangers-on are there. You fall into the drug thing. Liquor, pills; its too bad.
I think he ws simple unable to handle all of the shit that came down on him. He was twenty years old! And that’s not the first time that’s happened in our culture, as with rock stars that have not been able to handle fame and money thrown at them.
They mistake the recognition for importance. They have the fame, the recognition, bu they ain’t important. They’re demanding this, they’re demanding that because they’ve heard that’s the way you do it. And your major stars, who are really secure and comfortable, they never have that problem. They walk in and say, “Where do you want me to stand?” Boom. And they just do it.
You usually don’t have any rock and roll or hard rock on the show.
No, and I’ll tell you why. Because it’s too much of a problem for us every day to set them up. I had a group on once — I can’t remember the name of the group [Youngbloods]; I don’t think they’re in the business anymore — but they were really hot and they didn’t like the platform, they didn’t like the risers, they didn’t like the lights; they were talking to my director — who had only been directing for twenty-some years. So I went in and told them to pack up and get the hell out of the building.
I went on the air that night and I said, “We had booked, tonight, the so-and-so group. They didn’t like the lights, they didn’t like the directing, they didn’t like so forth; and so I told them to go home, blow their noses and when they grew up they could come back and be on the show.” And the audience applauded, because they had had it with that kind of behavior.
Is there anybody in rock you enjoy?
Oh sure. The Stones, and I think that Chicago and a lot niche groups are sensational. The Beatles were most talented; they could really write music. But some of the stuff I see nowadays . . . it’s like what Artur Rubinstein once said when I asked him to comment. He said: “I cannot comment on something I don’t understand”
It’s a howl, it’s noise, it’s a happening. Sometimes I cannot separate the musical talent from what is going on onstage. I cannot really separate it. The kids are screaming and you can’t really hear anything. I can’t understand, for example, how 100,000 kids can go to a speedway and be a mile from something going on onstage there. But it’s being there, being with your peers; it’s the culture. I’m there, I was there, but, as far as the music, I think it’s sold an awful lot of junk under the guise of talent. But kids, you see, are very fickle and there’ll be another band along next week. If that one falls out of favor there’s somebody else. We can go back to David Cassidy, you know. First, David Cassidy, next week there’s another hero, somebody to identify with.
Unlike some rock stars, virtually all comedians make themselves vulnerable to the audiences.
We go out naked.
Also, there’s an axiom that most comedians — a variation on the sad clown thing — are very intense and self-absorbed.
There’s a certain amount of truth in that. A lot of comedians are introspective, not the “sad clown” syndrome exactly; it’s more like the myth “to be funny, you must have suffered.” You must have been raised on the Lower East Side, and you must have fought your way out of this deprivation to be funny. That’s not really true. Do you have to starve, be deprived, to be a great writer?
But I think there’s a certain thing in creative people — and I’m not a psychiatrist — but I have found that people who are in the creative end of entertainment are not normal by most standards, whatever “normal” means. That is, as Margaret Sullavan said, “It’s not normal to walk out and bare your soul to a bunch of strangers, that’s not a normal thing for someone to do.” Most people find that very awkward, and entertainers do it. I find that most comedians are a little cynical, as well they should be.
And I am cynical about certain things. And people sometimes mistake the cynicism for being abrupt or cold. I think it’s just the way you perceive things around you. You’ve seen the silliness, the absurdity, the craziness that goes on in the world and you jump on that and expand it. You look at things in a different light. That’s what makes comedy.
Comedians are highly competitive, many of them. I think it was Lenny Bruce who said, “Comedians hate to see other comedians get laughs.” There are certain guys who really suffer when they see other comedians really scoring. I don’t. But I know a lot of guys where the competition among them is just ferocious. They talk about friendship and so forth, but a lot of them would kill each other. There’s something bizarre about guys who do comedy.
I find an intensity there.
[Nodding] And a certain amount of hostility.
I think Richard Pryor, for instance, is very aware of it himself.
Certainly. Of course, and he is. And he can be a very funny man. I’d like to see him not be so dirty, ’cause I don’t think he needs it. But I think that’s part of the hostility, and he comes out of the street, and it’s street language. And you either buy it or you don’t buy it.
Redd Foxx is a terribly angry man, and I think he knows it. He’s very hostile. And I don’t think it’s healthy. I think it’s hurting him a little bit. It’s just a big game, it’s a fuckin’ game when you come right down to it. It’s ridiculous, the competition, the drive and all of that. And people running around trying to be happy, not even knowing what the hell it is. I think that’s a common denominator.
Another question I want to ask. A comedian who does very well on the show seems to get invited back to the couch. Is that a deliberate gesture?
We try to figure out, first of all, if a guy has had six or seven good minutes. If he comes to the couch and he doesn’t do well, if you don’t know him well enough yet, that does not help him. He comes out as a klutz. Once a guy’s established and the audience knows him, he can come to the couch, you don’t have to have him do a stand-up first because you know he’s bright enough or can deliver a stand-up sitting down.
How do they know when to come over after they’ve done a well-received stand-up routine?
That’s usually done before the show. Some people resent it, especially agents. Agents resent it more than the talent. That’s a certain “goodie.” A sign, I guess, that you have arrived when you’ve come to sit in the chair. But if you are dismissed, it’s not being cruel. It’s what works for the show. The show’s the point. Sometimes you have to do it that way.
I’ve booked guests at times that did not get on. Some other guest may have an ulcer or makes leather belts and is going to come out and talk about it, but if a comedian is working well, it’s silly for me to say, “Well now we’ve got to stop this and bring out so-and-so, who’s going to tell us how to make leather belts.” I don’t give a shit at that time. I don’t want to wreck the pacing of the show. [Adamant] We create the show while it’s on the air.
People have said that Ed McMahon has one of the most engaging laughs in show business, while others have been very critical of him.
[Irritated] He’s not sitting there going “ha, ha, ha” at everything I say. It’s just the nature of the man. He can’t be all things to all people. Somebody might say, “Ed’s got to laugh at everything Johnny says . . .” We just fall into funny things together, and some of them do become rituals of a sort that we do too much, but we enjoy each other. We’ve been good friends for a long, long time.
Who directs the writers?
Well, I talked with them this morning. If I get an idea, I’ll call the guys and say, “Let’s do this.” I used to write for Skelton, and I write a lot of my nightclub material, and I contribute a certain amount to the show. The job of a comedian is to be a good editor and say, “That’s good” or “I don’t like it.” You don’t have to give any reasons. It’s a very tough show to write.
Ernie Kovacs was a real innovator and recognized the possibilities of that form of pure television where the camera is a partner in what’s going on. Were you an admirer of his?
Well, here’s where I may get in trouble, if you want me to be honest. Kovacs was an innovator. I didn’t know him, I had only met him. So I don’t know whether he was really a funny guy. I know he did bizarre things, but most of the stuff, if you look at it in retrospect, does not holdup very well. Because he fell into certain devices, using camera tricks, sound effects, as kind of shock things. And I didn’t find them that funny.
I thought he was tyring to make a point about the surrealistic qualities of humor, and he sought to explore these notions — funny or not.
I think he had a point of view, and I guess I just wasn’t a Kovacs fan. And that’s taking nothing away from him. A lot of people think Chaplin was the greatest of all times. I don’t hold with that. That’s almost sacrilegious to say if you are in comedy. Chaplin was a superb artist but I don’t think that everything he did was all that great. I think that some of the stuff that Buster Keaton did was as good as Chaplin’s. He just didn’t touch people like Chaplin did. Chaplin seemed to he able to touch both bases — pathos and comedy — better than Keaton. But I think that Keaton was a better physical comedian.
Polite drawing-room humor is a dying art. Comedy is more aggressive these days. Looking back, actors like W.C. Fields kicked the ball in that direction.
Fans today, they would love Fields, you know. Because he was against everything. Kick a dog in the ass, rail against every social convention. There was a black humor, a hostility there. He had a terrible childhood, you know, terrible childhood.
What do you think of the kind of black humor you see on Saturday Night Live?
I’ve often thought being bizarre just to be bizarre is no good. I’ve seen Animal House, and the kids will probably hate me for saying that I don’t think Animal House is very funny. Again, it’s my own personal point of view. I don’t think it’s very clever. To me, a food fight is sophomoric.
Those sophomoric qualities are also in the slapstick tradition.
Don’t misunderstand me, I like slapstick. Laurel and Hardy did a lot of slapstick, but there was a certain timing and cleverness about it, a certain reaction, an interplay. All I saw here were a bunch of people doing crazy things.
It’s a distillation of the college humor . . .
[Arguing] It’s outrageous to be outrageous. Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, to me, was a far better, more clever picture. It was funny, he said funny things. But he made social points along the way. It was a tender relationship between people.
Chevy Chase said recently that he felt it was very gratifying for all comedians that, Woody Allen won the Oscars for Annie Hall. He said it was a sign that a comedian was finally being taken seriously. Did you feel that Allen’s awards represented a significant breakthrough?
Yes, in a way it was, because it was the first time in my lifetime, I think, that comedy has, really been honored. Comedy has always been thought of as frivolous and not too important and doesn’t have the social meaning, you know, as a “deep” picture, when in fact it does. I mean, what if you didn’t have the comedians? What if you didn’t have any funny people?
Making people laugh is so damn hard. If you talk with Steve Martin, I think you’ll find Steve a very introspective man, and very quiet and bizarre in many ways, but I don’t think you’d find him, if you sat around in a room with him, hysterically funny. I think you’ll find Mel Brooks more that way, because he has to be silly all of the time. He’d be sitting there saying, “Well, I’ll-tell-you-this-” and he’d be doing a shtick, and that’s Mel.
Still, I think they all spend a lot of time thinking about the human condition. Would you describe yourself as intense or introspective?
I suppose. I’m an extrovert when I work. I’m an introvert when I don’t. But if I’m with a group of friends and things start to cook, I’ll get in and be very funny, start to function.
Are you a big reader of humorists?
Yeah, I’ve read a lot over the years. You know, Stephen Leacock, Benchley and Mark Twain. I think the first book I ever read on humor was by Max Eastman, when I was in high school. He was explaining jokes, why people laugh.
George Burns put it as well as anybody. He says, “If you laugh, it’s funny.”
Are you conscious of the enormous influence The Tonight Show has?
Only when I get out in the country when I go play concerts. It’s amazing to me, the reaction. I get so close to it that I really don’t realize sometimes the power or the exposure of that show.
You are, in my mind, a great believer in television and its possibilities to influence people and inform them.
Basically. I can go do a concert in middle Iowa somewhere, and those people are aware. You can go out and do humor about what’s going on, politically or otherwise anywhere in this country, and they know what’s going on — because of television.
Look what the kids are exposed to by the time they are six. Forgetting the commercials, just look at what they are exposed to. It’s incredible when you start to think about it. Thanks to TV, you see men walk on the moon. They can see almost anything at all. And its great if parents are really selective — of course, parents don’t want to do that, because that’s a responsibility they don’t want to take. And I get so mad at the critical cut-down of television all the time, that a child may see 25,000 murders and that you can’t be with a child all the time to see what he’s seeing.
Also though, especially in young minds, you have the notion of TV keeping one company. Problem is, people see lives on television and they don’t compare favorably with their own life in any way, shape or form. Their frustrations are fired.
That’s true; I did a special [in 1969] for Monsanto, which they hated. But I liked it. They missed some of the points I was making. For example, in the special, I opened up on a television set, a close-up, it was a toy commercial: “Hey kids! Be the first in your neighborhood to have this wonderful whatever-it-was for $29.95.” And we pulled the camera back slowly, and it was a tenement flat. There were three little black kids, whom I hired from Harlem, sitting in a one-room flat watching the TV. A poor black lady and her kids were lying on a bed, just looking at this commercial. And I felt it was making a very poignant point. They were exposed to this, but it was completely out of their realm of reality, and the announcer was saying, “Run out and tell dad, be the first in your neighborhood, etc.” and these kids, who had no dad, were just watching it.
For them, at that moment, it would be easier to go to the moon.
That’s right. That was the point we were making. One of the critics said he didn’t understand why, in the middle of the show, we had this toy commercial.
Still, you believe that TV has been a great informer.
It can be a great informer. I don’t know whether it is. You see, I’ve always felt, when they say the job of television is to educate — I don’t think that is the job of television at all. That’s the schools’ job and the parents’ job. People who think you can put a kid in front of a television set and he is going to learn are crazy. You still need that relationship, I think, with the teacher and other students. With education you’ve got to participate. The only reason I ever learned anything is that I had teachers along the way that I enjoyed, that got me interested. The television set was going to be the great boon of civilization. It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.
On the show sometimes, people have to be informed to get the joke. You assume they are.
Absolutely. It is assumed that the people have read the paper, but as you know, most people don’t. They get most of their news from the six o’clock or the eleven o’clock news. That’s usually adequate for my purposes, but it’s not the same thing. There was a joke I did one night mentioning Alexander Haig, and the audience hadn’t the slightest idea who Alexander Haig was. They simply didn’t know. Sometimes it bothers me a little bit that they might not know what I am talking about. I read a survey last week, and it said that a large percentage of the American public had not read a book since they got out of high school. They read magazines, periodicals, but not a book.
To read about what Bianca Jagger is doing is not high on my list of priorities. I could not give a shit what Bianca Jagger is doing, or what Jackie 0. is doing, but those are the people you constantly read about. I guess it takes folks out of their ordinary humdrum lives when they read about Suzanne Somers. Nobody’s life is humdrum, but they all crave information on instant celebrities. They have this voracious appetite for making new stars. Whatever happened to Henry Winkler? The Fonz? I mean, is that interesting?
Do you feel that it is incumbent upon you to have these celebrities on the show?
Yeah, but without going into their names, some of them don’t have anything except their manufactured celebrity status. Yet we would be foolish if we didn’t put people on who are in the public eye. You can’t just have the people you want. You’ll have a show hooked sometimes with “names” and it doesn’t work. And the next night, you’ll have a show where nobody is particularly bigname, and it’s magic.
Do you watch the show when other people are hosting?
Very seldom.
Any particular reason for that?
No.
How about watching yourself?
Joanna will watch my monologue. I won’t because I’ve done it. And sometimes I don’t like to look at it because maybe I’ll think of other things. If we’re doing a new character, a new sketch, or something has happened on the show that went crazy, I might look at that. I don’t particularly like to watch myself unless I’m doing something really good.
How do guest hosts get chosen?
We just have a number of people and we just submit them or Freddie [de Cordova] handles it, ’cause that’s a problem, to find people who can sustain it for any length of time. It’s not so difficult to do one, two or three nights. The trick is to do it for a week or two.
What’s the story on the controversy with Chevy Chase and whether someday he’ll take over the show?
You know something? I don’t know how that started. I really don’t. I didn’t know Chevy Chase outside of seeing him on Saturday Night. I started seeing these things in magazines, about Chevy Chase making remarks about The Tonight Show. Some of them were little zingers. From the way I saw it, I got the impression that somebody was doing some publicity for somebody and was planting it.
I don’t have a publicity agent. Haven’t had anybody for years. I have a lawyer, that’s all. I don’t have any press people or anything. So I’d read these things and some of them are little zingers. Chevy saying, “Well I can’t see myself sitting there talking with some dumb starlet for ten minutes.”
Well, I might reply, “Who’s ever asked you? Who thought you could do it in the first place?” As if that’s all there is to it. I did throw a line against Chevy Chase once. Somebody talked about ad-libbing, and I said that I didn’t think Chevy Chase could ad-lib a fart after a baked-bean dinner. I think he took umbrage at that a little bit.
But people love to read this shit. That makes a story. I remember once Streisand, she was booked on the show and we had a call that afternoon saying she wasn’t going to come; I don’t know why. But we billboarded her for two days.
I went out and said that Barbra Streisand was supposed to be here, she hasn’t been here for twelve years, but I think it will probably be another twelve years before she is asked back. It was just a little joke, nothing vicious. [Smirking] So the next night, I get Madlyn Rhue, and we dressed her up in a Streisand get-up and she started to do “People.” For a moment you couldn’t tell if it was Streisand or not because she was lip-synching. I walked over, and said, “Thank you, but we don’t need you.” And she walked back to the curtain and it was wonderful. I was just taking advantage of what was going on. And of course the papers picked that up and they made a big thing about Streisand and I having a quarrel.
Speaking of this, I remember the time that Dick Shawn was hosting the show and he turned the set completely upside down, knocked over your desk and used it as a boat for an ad-libbed routine.
[Sternly] He had no right to do that.
To a great extent that little living room seems like your living room.
Yes, and when I heard about Shawn doing that, I didn’t like it, to be honest with you. I didn’t see the show, but when somebody told me that he tipped over the desk and did all this, I just didn’t like the idea of him taking it and then dumping the thing all over. It just wasn’t his prerogative to do that. You’ll notice that Shawn hasn’t been on the show since then. I think he probably did it out of desperation. When you get to a point when nothing’s working, you think, “What can I do to get their attention?” You drop your pants or you tip over a desk. If I got up and set fire to my desk, I’d have a right to do that. It’s mine.
Later on, there was a show one night where your desk was a breakaway desk and you destroyed it.
Right. It had big shock value. We pulled in a breakaway desk one night. Just to break the pattern. See, the trick is you try to keep from being boring, which is the worst thing in the world. You don’t want to go out and bore people. If there’s any format on the show, that’s the format.
Television does great things with news. They do great things on sports. They cover political things well — I think the coverage of the Middle East thing — it’s been fantastic coverage. They went to the moon and sent it back here and you see it, but people forget those things. They see Three’s Company and they’re all worried about tits and asses, the “jiggle syndrome.” You know, girls running around with their boobs jumping up and down a little bit and that’s a big crisis in the country. It’s not going to get any easier to present quality.
We did a couple of jokes on Carter’s son getting divorced, and you have to be kind of careful that you don’t get too personal. Saturday Night Live, on the other hand, will go after anybody. They’ve done some outrageous things, and I don’t always agree with them. I think the thing they did on Claudine Longet, while it was funny, was unfair, and I think some of the stuff they did on Patty Hearst at the same time was really unfair. No matter what position you take, the girl was really in serious trouble. And Claudine Longet was up for manslaughter, and they were doing a thing, a skiing thing, where shots were ringing out and everybody was falling down dead. For some people it was very funny, but other people thought it was very unfair. But that’s a judgment. And what one person sees is not what I’ll see.
How about something that pertains to the political climate, to CIA meanderings.
We’ve really whacked away at some of those things, like the FBI when the Watergate thing was on.
I got the impression you felt very strongly about Watergate.
I did. I guess, like a lot of people, I felt let down. I resented people like Nixon and Agnew moralizing from the tops of their voices about morality and putting down the kids who didn’t want to fight in Vietnam and talking about high moral principles when they were deceiving everybody. If they weren’t so damn highly moral about it, it would be one thing, but I don’t know how many people even know how much they were screwing the political process and using it for their own benefit. I think politicians in those positions have to have better standards. If they ask for those jobs, then they better have better standards than the rest of us. I’m not saying my morals were any better, but I wasn’t the president. And I think when you’re in those kinds of jobs and you have the public trust, then you should play it by the book.
Maybe that’s tough for people to do, but you can’t go on moralizing about how people should behave and what they should do when you’re not doing it yourself. It’s like the religious leaders around, you know, all getting rich on the world’s guilt.
Are there any people you’d love to have on the show but have never corralled?
I keep kidding Cary Grant every time I see him. It’s become a running joke now, ’cause he just won’t do it. He just feels uncomfortable, and I understand that. Bill Boyd was another one — Hopalong Cassidy; I wanted to get Bill Boyd on the show, and he was a big fan of the show. I remember sitting with him in Danny’s Hide-a-way in New York, and he said, “Johnny, I love the show, but I don’t want to hurt the image.” He just felt uncomfortable. I liked him so much ’cause he was an interesting character. He was married five times, you know. He was a Hollywood leading man in the silent days that most people have no knowledge of. Handsome guy, one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen in my life. White hair. But he couldn’t come on. Wanted to get him on with Gabby Hayes. Couldn’t get him on.
Anyone else in public life?
I don’t have politicians on very often for one simple reason: I find that most of them are not very entertaining. They’ll tell you what they want to tell you and no more. They always have an image or set point of view, and you get into equal time provisions as soon as you do it.
There are other shows that can do it better. Meet the Press does it better. Face the Nation, that’s their thing. They can do it much better than I can do it. I don’t want to be in the role of inquisitor. I don’t think people want to watch that at 11:30 till one at night. I never have thought that. Not for me anyway. I don’t want Yasir Arafat on the show. I don’t want to sit and talk to Menachem Begin. Not that it wouldn’t be interesting, but I don’t think that in the format of our show that’s what I want to be.
I recall a time when you had Nixon on when he wasn’t running for office, after he lost the California gubernatorial race.
Sure, that was fun, that was different, ’cause he wasn’t running at that time and he was a national figure. I had John Lindsay on in New York, and that was fun. I only had John on because we were friends and he was kind of a charmer and almost a professional himself. And I had Agnew on, and he bored the shit out of everybody and moralized. I liked Hubert Humphrey very much. I found Hubert Humphrey a nice man.
Bobby Kennedy I had on, because he’s a Kennedy, but there, you see, you’re dealing with somebody bigger than life when you have a Robert Kennedy on. You’re not dealing with a William Proxmire or Wally Hickel or somebody like that, and I had Johnson on once. But in the long run, it doesn’t really go anywhere, ’cause then you fall into the equal-time thing. And I don’t want the show to become a political forum. Most politicians are so politically oriented, self-oriented.
Ronnie Reagan, I know well, and I had Ronnie on two days before he announced he was gonna run [for president], but he couldn’t tell me on the show, right? I would say, “Ron, is there anything you want to tell me tonight?” And the audience would giggle, and I would say, “Now come on, Ron.” Well, he knew he’d decided, but he’s not gonna tell me. So I don’t really get an honest interview. Politicians are only gonna tell you what’s gonna make them look good, and you’re not gonna get much deeper than that.
Why did the show move from New York to Los Angeles? I’ve heard a lot of reasons.
We found it was much easier to work out here. Facilities are better. Studios are better. It’s all in one building. If we want to do a sketch, all I have to do is call and say, “I need a bathtub that comes through a wall,” and I’ve got it tomorrow.
The facilities in New York are terrible. All the shows moved out. Where you used a have the Sullivan show and lots of variety shows, they all disappeared. There’s nothing coming out of New York now except news and a few game shows. That’s it. And at this point in my life, I enjoy playing tennis, enjoy going to the beach. I lived in New York seventeen years; I like the idea, as corny as it sounds, of a yard and a house. Maybe that’s the old Midwestern values, but I like being able to walk outside in the morning and sit around; you can’t do that in New York. That’s the only reason.
People remain nostalgic about those old days when The Tonight Show gang hung out in John Hurley’s bar on Sixth Avenue, for instance, with Mitch Miller and everybody.
Yeah, that’s true. And I can remember the early days in California nostalgia, but all those places are gone now. You’d say, “Hey, let’s go to Ciro’s. Let’s go to Mocambo,” and the Sunset Strip had what was supposed to be glamour. There was a certain style to it, but that’s gone. Those days are gone. And it’s like the Oscars. You know, I’m going to host the Oscars this year, and somebody said, “Why don’t we make it like the old days and the glamour?” I said you can’t. Don’t they understand? Gable’s dead. Jimmy Cagney’s sitting on a farm; Bogart is dead; All of those bigger-than-life people. I said you’re talking about something that was in the Thirties and early Forties and is gone. People keep saying, “What happened to the glamour days in Hollywood?” It’s a new era.
When you mention hosting the Oscars, I recall a number of times you were offered nice movie roles and you always turned them down.
I haven’t seen anything I really liked, to be very honest with you. They were just movies, and any idiot could make a movie.
Blazing Saddles was one film offered to you.
Yeah, and I’m only off three weeks at the most at any time. You can’t make a picture in three weeks. And at my age now, being a movie star doesn’t excite me that much. The only thing that would be nice, I suppose, would be to have international recognition. They would know you in other countries if you made a picture. Maybe I will sometime, I don’t know. I might sit down with somebody and write it.
I know that you worked briefly on the stage; did you ever have any inclination to do something like that again?
I don’t have that drive. I don’t know why. Some people think you have not lived or satisfied your psyche unless you appear on the boards on Broadway. I have great respect for Broadway actors because I know the discipline that is entailed in doing something night after night, the same lines. I found that I only did Tunnel of Love for three months; I thought it very boring after a while, but that’s the challenge of a good actor, just to make it fresh every night. I enjoy the feedback you get from it. Especially The Tonight Show. I don’t think I’d be happy doing a situation comedy anymore. Sure, I never have, but I can’t see myself going and playing a role as a private detective in a situation comedy because I think it’d probably be pretty dull. And I have no desire to do specials, because on The Tonight Show, there’s almost anything I’d want to do on a special. We do sketches, we do blackouts, do the characters, et cetera.
I only did one special for Monsanto. But nowadays you see . . . suppose I put a special together. Somebody says, “Okay, Carson, we want to go on at eight at night.” Then you find out that ABC has bought a two-hour movie, Poseidon Adventure or Animal House, and they throw it on opposite you. You’re going to get killed. Television is the only industry that eats its young.
I wondered if you think TV, across the board, reflects the prevailing tastes and interests of America.
That has always been a subject of great discussion. When critics complain, the usual reaction from the networks is that we’re giving the people what they want. But that also applies to car manufacturers, when you think about it. They always say, “Well the people want big cars; they want lots of chrome.” I’m not sure they are giving the people what they want. If they’ve never given them anything else in quantity to sample, how would you know what they really want?
If you went out on the street and asked a hundred people what was wrong with television, many of them would probably say, “Well, there’s not enough fine drama, not enough documentaries,” et cetera. They would try to be eclectic in their answers because they don’t want to look like dummies. They would all say there’s not enough news, there’s not enough social relevance in television. And yet, when you put it on, the people en masse don’t seem to watch it. If twenty million people watch something in this country, that’s not enough of an audience, which is kind of sad in itself.
It’s my opinion that TV usually caters to the lowest common denominator, especially in terms of humor.
I suppose. I think it was George S. Kaufman who said, “Satire closes Saturday night.” I suppose if you tried to do what you would call an esoteric — I hate that word — satirical type of comedy review, you’d have an audience for it, but you wouldn’t have a mass audience for it. I think they probably go for a more general audience type of comedy that people can easily relate to — where they don’t have to think too much.
Then you come down to the question: What is television’s job? What is its role? As long as television exists to sell products and that’s what it is in the long run, a medium to sell beer, soap, cigarettes, deodorants, breakfast cereals — there’ll be problems with overall quality. As an advertiser, for example, I can see very well why a soap-manufacturing company would buy Laverne & Shirley versus Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It comes down to the numbers again.
The Tonight Show envinces a liberal attitude. But I sometimes wonder how much of the audience objects, from point to point, when a lot of things are bleeped out.
We get letters like that from liberal people. It’s a little ridiculous to bleep a dirty word, whatever it means. Even “damn” and “hell,” for years, were not used in motion pictures, which always intrigued me, especially when you see a war picture.
I was watching Patton the other night, and it was remarkable that they let “bastard” go through. They wouldn’t let ”shit” go through, you see. They had to draw the line there, because that was apparently corruptive and too touch for people to take. They substituted “dung.” And you’d see Patton say “horsedung.” And I thought that was hysterical. Somebody sat in an editing room and said, “We have to edit this. What can we have him say instead of ‘horseshit’?”
Probably the most commonly used phrase, by men, women and children at any time during the day, is “Oh, shit.” You step on your friend’s toe and you say, “Oh, shit.” George Carlin does a whole thing on it. But you see, they still had to draw the line on that for mass consumption on television. For some reason, Patton saying “horseshit” was going to have some effect; I don’t know what effect it would have, but that’s worthy of sitting down and having a psychologist, sociologist discuss that. What would that have done to people? Would children be corrupted? I doubt it, since every four-year-old is saying that word, whether he knows what it means or not.
Back to the monologue — the other night when you were going into a commercial, you closed with “shit!” And the audience was stunned.
Shock value. Nothing but pure shock value. I did it one night inadvertently. A joke had died or something, and I had said, “Ahh, shit.” Again, it’s the way you say it, it’s how you say it, it’s the attitude when you say it. You can say that word, and it can be so inoffensive and you can say it and make it offensive.
Did you ever hear the Beach Boys’ “Johnny Carson” song?
Sure I heard it. Someone sent it over to the office. I don’t think it was a big seller. I think they just did it for the fun of it. It was not a work of art.
How do you unwind from the tension of a life of television? I know you play a lot of tennis; also, you’ve done some sky diving.
Many of my outside interests started, basically, for the show, my own amusement, the Walter Mitty syndrome. Plimpton had done it. Everybody’s done it. It was just a thing of getting involved in kind of hairy experiences. It was good for the show. I think the first one I did was pitching to Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and Yankee stadium. Then I drove the Indy car, I flew with the Thunderbirds in their air show, did some sky diving, quarterbacked the New York Jets for a series of plays. Those kinds of things. It was fun. It was good for the show, it was fun to do. The network didn’t even know I was going to do it [laughter]. But you reach a point where there aren’t that many things that are really hairy or exciting enough. Once you’ve done the free-fall parachute stuff and flown with the Thunderbirds, where do you go? What’s left?
Pat McCormick told me a very funny story about one time when you were going into the Polo Lounge, and you didn’t have a tie. So you put on a tie, but you took off your shoes and socks.
[Laughing slyly] I stayed there almost the whole night. I remember we went out somewhere else later, with me still not wearing shoes or socks, and nobody said a thing. Maybe ’cause I had a tie on. It wasn’t in the rule book I guess.
Do you enjoy practical jokes like that?
[Laughing] Yeah, but you don’t find any good practical jokes anymore. The old days of practical jokes . . . somebody did a whole book on them, H. Allen Smith’s The Complete Practical Joker. Practical jokes are funny as long as they don’t hurt anybody.
Another example?
Oh, when Freddie de Cordova came back recently from Africa — he was over there with Irving Lazar — I got our set designer to come down with all of the staff and we redid Freddie’s whole office. We tore out all his furniture and redid it like an African hut in the bush. And I hired two black guys with drums to come in, and all the staff showed up. I had a pith helmet, boots, shorts and his whole office was palm fronds and stumps. And when he walked in that morning, we had sound effects with thejungle noises, like an African village. That was funny! Just for the reaction. He couldn’t get over it. That was a fun joke but it’s just hard to do. For the whole day he had to keep it that way. He could hardly find his desk.
I recall seeing Rodney Dangerfield for the first time on your show.
I knew Rodney when he worked under another name, Jack Roy. Fifteen or twenty years ago. He worked the mountains, the clubs, then he stepped out of the business for a while. I think one of his lines — goes to show you how successful he was — was that when he retired he was the only one who knew he had retired. And I asked him one night, “Do you know where you got the name Rodney Dangerfield?” He says, “No I don’t.” And I told him where the name came from.
I remembered a sketch that Jack Benny did some twenty years ago on his show, and here, I said, is the way the name Rodney Dangerfield came about. Jack and Mary Benny were holding a party. And Jack came into the room and said: “Mary, who’s coming to the party tonight?” They had a big guest list. And. Mary said, “Well, Jack, the Gary Coopers can’t make it, Gary is making a picture.” And jack said, “Aww, they can’t make it?!” And then she said, “The Ronald Colmans are busy, Ronnie was busy tonight.” And Jack would go, “Ohhh, they can’t make it?!” Then she said, “Jack, the Jimmy Stewarts also are not able to come tonight.” “Well, who has accepted?” he asked. Mary said, “So far, we have Rodney Dangerfield.” And there was a scream. The audience loved it.
Rodney’s a funny man; he’s got the physical appearance and the voice to do those put-down lines. Unfortunately, he’s trapped a little bit in that character. But what he does he does very well.
I saw Andy Kaufman opening for Dangerfield at The Comedy Store in L.A. He was working in his persona as Tony Clifton, a potbellied Borsch Belt comic who’s so obnoxious he compels the crowd to boo him offstage.
Kaufman will take a chance and say: “How far can you go with something? How far can I stick with this before the audience will either buy it or get outraged?” He’s a funny cat, takes a chance. He comes out and he experiments with an audience and will stand up there and will face them down. Sometimes you hit, sometimes you don’t, but that’s the only way; you have to take a few chances and do something to see what kind of reaction you’re going to get, otherwise you don’t find anything new to do.
If you look around, you see right now with Steve Martin, with an Andy Kaufman, with Robin Williams, this kind of out-of-the-wall, bizarre comedy. Animal House certainly brings this out.
Does this brand of humor reflect something more than the desire to break new ground?
I don’t know. I just see that trend, with Steve and Andy and Robin Williams coming to mind as exponents.
Some observers feel that the Second City improvisational theater, the National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live and performers like Steve Martin have helped spawn a unique strain of humor. It’s iconoclastic, very personal, and sometimes rather black humor. I’ve heard it called the New Humor.
Well, humor has changed somewhat; it has expanded. Especially on TV. A lot of restrictions and taboos are gone from TV in terms of what you can talk about. It’s a lot freer. I can remember that ten to fifteen years ago I couldn’t tell a joke about pot on the air; couldn’t even mention it.
I think the National Lampoon is good at what it does. It’s got an effective parody style, one that can be accurate. What they do is often blunt and cutting and it’s important to have that voice. I’ve just seen their Sunday newspaper parody and it is very funny. It’s really right on. I think its one of the best things they’ve done.
As for Steve Martin, he has a likable comedic style when he works within the framework of the white-suit-and-banjo character he’s created; in his act, you see, he’s a schlemiel pretending he’s not. It’s well done, but it can be limiting. He’s been doing it for a while, so I’ll be interested to see where he goes with it, where he takes it in the future.
Saturday Night Live’s cast takes a lot of chances, a lot of real risks in the kinds of things they do, and I’ve liked a good many of them. The fact that they’re live and the element of risk involved has a lot to do with their humor and its impact. [Coyly] And if they don’t always turn out funny, well, they don’t seem to get terribly upset about that.
All good comedy has a dimension of risk, and on your show you seem to accept and enjoy that fact.
The charm of The Tonight Show is greatest when things are not going well. That’s the challenge. When the elements are right and everybody’s freewheeling, it stimulates both comedians and other guest performers and it becomes a stream-of-consciousness thing. On other nights, the trick is to make something out of what isn’t happening, [Laughter] But every night, it’s like walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon — at anytime, somebody might push you off.
Is it especially hard for a woman to be a comedian?
Very difficult. It’s because of the old role models that are assigned. A woman is feminine, a woman is not abrasive, a woman is not a hustler. So when you see a gal who does “stand-up” one-liners, she has to overcome that built-in identification as a retiring, meek woman. I mean, if a woman comes out and starts firing one-liners, those little abrasive things, you can take that from a man. The only one who really does it is Joanie Rivers, who’s had, I think, great success with being a stand-up comedian. The other gals, like Lucille Ball, who was obviously a great comedy actress, and Carol Burnett — it’s a different role that they play than standing onstage and doing jokes. I think it’s much tougher for women. You don’t see many of them around. And the ones that try, sometimes are a little aggressive for my taste. I’ll take it from a guy, but from women, sometimes, it just doesn’t fit too well.
Have you thought about the limitations and frustrations of comedy?
The philosophic questions about laughter leave me cold. I know what I can do and what I think is funny and what makes me laugh. And what I can do that makes people laugh. I prefer to concentrate on what I know.
So many people would like to get to know you better; what’s the most frequent reaction that people have when they run into you, meet you?
I’ve been so visible for so many years. Somebody once said that I was one of the most recognizable people, at least in the United States, which is only because I’m going on seventeen years on The Tonight Show. Plus doing five years on the daytime show. Somebody almost has to go out of their way not to see you, if you’re there. But that applies to anybody in the public eye.
The standard reaction or remark, really, used to be: “I go to bed with you every night.” After a while that loses a bit of its pungency. The show has been on so long; you know I’ve had kids come up to me who weren’t even born when I started the show. You have a whole new audience of young kids, maybe thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old, who are discovering the show, and, it started before they were even around. That’s intriguing.
What always amazes me about The Tonight Show is the age span of the audience. It goes from twelve-year-olds on up. They’ll see it on Friday night. I get fan mail from seventy-five-year-old people. Mail from college kids, the so-called sophisticated or hip crowd.
How did that Casablanca record come about? The two-record set of highlights of the show?
It wasn’t my idea. It didn’t do very well, strangely enough. I wasn’t particularly enthralled with the idea because I think a lot of things we do don’t transfer from video to audio very well.
This obviously is a completely hypothetical question: Do you think that you and your kind of humor could have worked out in England?
Let me put it this way. They’ve wanted to do The Tonight Show from England. I saw Paar do it. He had The Tonight Show over there and it didn’t work very well. And Cavett went over there and it didn’t work very well. I said, “I would be happy to go to England and do The Tonight Show if you will get English television to carry the show for about six weeks before we go over there.” To walk in cold where they don’t know who the hell I am or what I do is a difficult thing to do.
People always have the idea that the English love sophisticated comedy, dry wit and so forth. Not true. If you go and look at English television and the comedians, a good percentage of it is low comedy. They go in for a lot of music-hall bandy, dropping of pants, toilet jokes, it is incredible. When I first saw it, I was expecting Noel Coward; I was thinking of the witty, dry British sense of humor, and I saw these guys out there doing wee-wee jokes. Also, they love guys in drag, and infantile humor.
It’s interesting that no British comedian that I know of has ever been a hit in this country. I don’t mean Terry Thomas, Peter Sellers and those kinds of folks — they’re actors. And yet our comedians can go over and play the Paladium and be big successes.
Rock music doesn’t go over well in prime time. It’s another unsuccessful transplant.
Television is not a good medium for music generally, because people have a six-hundred television set and the speaker is a little two-inch thing in the set. That’s not a good way to listen to music.
Tommy, I guess, was the first big thing where they tried to carry rock into a different medium, an opera, and it had a modicum of success. But I don’t think it was a big hit. And The Rocky Horror Picture Show . . . it’s almost become a cult. Sgt. Pepper of course was a monumental bust. Grease, from what I read, is apparently not very good.
Have you met Robert Stigwood?
Don’t think so. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know that many of them. I’ve seen the members of Kiss interviewed. It was like interviewing four children. They really didn’t have anything to say. They were all caught up in what they’re doing, and [bitchy], “Man, we put the makeup on, I’m not going to be seen in public without the makeup . . .” I find it all superficial.
The one I talked to that I liked is Alice Cooper. I found him a very charming, interesting guy. So I take it back. And I do like him. ‘Cause I think he’s got a little more perspective on what he’s doing. I’ve met him socially and I’ve had him on the show. When I see a guy named Alice Cooper and I look at his shows, I have already prejudged him, which you shouldn’t do.
I can’t put rock and roll down because anything that’s lasted as long as rock and roll has, you can’t dismiss. You can’t say it’s a fad. It ain’t a fad.
Ever been to a Rolling Stones concert?
I saw one in New York once. It was crazy. Absolutely crazy. I went with some people from the station, just so I knew what I was talking about. It’s just mass hysteria.
Was that in 1975 at Madison Square Garden?
No, it was earlier than that, but it was like mass hysteria. It was like when the Beatles first came here, it was just mass hysteria. Pubescent hysteria.
Are you sorry you didn’t have the Beatles on the show?
You know, it was funny, they were fans of the show, because I remember when they were first on the Sullivan show, when they first came here, and Ed Sullivan told me [imitating Sullivan], “These youngsters are really, really fans of the Johnny Carson Tonight Show.” I guess it’s one of the shows they’d seen when they first visited the States and were checking out our culture.
You know, [sadly], if I gave you a list of the people who had been on the show that are dead, it would stagger you. When I start going down the list of the people that I have been on the show from the opening show — Joan Crawford, Groucho Marx, Charles Laughton to Peter Lorre; you know, big, big names like Sophie Tucker, Ted Lewis, Jayne Mansfield and, recently, Freddie Prinze, Jack Cassidy. Hundreds and hundreds of people have passed away in the last seventeen years that were all on the show. It gives you a strange feeling sometimes.
Is there anybody in history that you would’ve liked to have on the show?
[Smiriking] Attila the Hun.
I think you two would’ve done some pretty wild slapstick routines together.
[Laughing] That’s an interesting question, really. Da Vinci probably; he could’ve been a hell of an interview. Or Isaac Newton, because my hobby is astronomy. I’m fascinated with astronomy. I was up at five the other morning. I woke up — I think the dog was barking — I came outside and got the telescope out and was sitting there at five in the morning. It’s a real mind bender. Gorgeous. Yeah, somebody like Newton, Keppler, Copernicus.
In a book called The Human Comedy by William Saroyan, he writes about how people make transitions in their lives; you just presume everything is there and will take care of itself, and then there’s that transitional period in everyone’s life when they realize if they are going to be happy for the rest of their lives, if they’re going to enjoy life and fight off the boredom that’s probably the big enemy of life, they are going to have to make a conscious effort to make themselves happy. I’ve wondered if there was a certain point in your life, a certain moment of self-esteem and self-worth upon which you built every other experience.
I know what Saroyan’s saying. There comes a time or a moment, I don’t know whether you can say it precisely, when you know in which direction you’re going to go. Even when you’re young. But you don’t know why exactly. I know it happened to me when I was quite young.
You go through those phases — “I’ll be a doctor or I’ll be . . .” — the standard things. But I think it’s when you find out, at least for me, that you can get in front of an audience and be in control. I think that probably happened in grade school, fifth or sixth grade, where I could get attention by being different, by getting up in front of an audience or even a group of kids and calling the attention to myself by what I did or said or how I acted. And I said, “Hey, I like that feeling.”
When I was a kid, I was shy. And I think I did that because it was a device to get attention. And to get that reaction is a strange feeling, it is a high that I don’t think you can get from drugs. I don’t think you could get it from anything else. The mind starts to do things that you didn’t even realize it could do. It’s hard to explain.
And you walk off and you’re just, everything is such a high, and it’s a great feeling, and that’s why many performers have big highs and very big lows. Most of them that I know. I know I do.
People don’t understand that. They put you down as being standoffish or cool or so forth. It’s not that.
I suppose it’s the manipulation, I suppose it’s the sense of power, the center of attention and the me-ism. And performers have to have that. You see, that’s one of the things that goes against the grain of being brought up; you should be modest, you should be humble, you shouldn’t draw attention to yourself. Well, to be an entertainer, you must.
You gotta be a little gutsy, a little egotistical, so you have to pull back sometimes when people say, “Well, he’s stuck-up.” Stuck-up is only another word for self-conscious. You aren’t stuck-up. You are aloof, because you aren’t very comfortable so you put up this barrier.
Do you recall the specific moment — a spelling bee or a class recitation or a play or something — when you crossed over that barrier?
I think it was in a play. A Christmas play, as a matter of fact — Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. My classmate Dorothy Ward played the Ghost of Christmas Present. I played the little boy who went to fetch the turkey, and this man, Scrooge, gave me a shilling to do it. And I realized that I was the center of attention. I realized that people were saying, “Hey, look, he’s in a play.” That makes you different right off, you see. You’re stepping out of here, and you’re stepping into a make-believe world, and all of a sudden people are looking at you. You like that, but at the same time, you find that you have an ambivalent feeling.
So you had a shyness and an awkwardness that you had to conquer?
[Sheepish] Yeah, oh yeah. I just felt uncomfortable. I still feel uncomfortable in large groups of people. Not audiences, mind you. With audiences, I’m fine. I can go out in front of 20,000 people because I’m in charge. See, most entertainers feel that way. When you walk into a large group of people, you’re not in charge, and all of a sudden I sometimes feel uncomfortable.
It’s hard to find a focus.
That’s right. You see, when you’re on the stage all the focus comes here. They’re watching you and you’re in control. Now you walk into a reception or a cocktail party full of two-hundred people, I find that unsettling. I know a lot of people who are entertainers, they, you know, get up against the wall at these times or sit in a corner. If they’re up in front, they’re fine. So there are two ambivalent things at work there. David Susskind’s favorite word, dichotomy; which he loves to use — there is that in performers.
I think people who are creative, in the arts, also seem to have larger appetites for life than most people, to excess usually. Whether it be drinking, whether it be sex, whether it be anything, the appetites seem to be larger. I don’t know why, but they seem to be that way. And with writers too — most of them don’t seem to be terribly happy people, whatever that means. Because I guess you are always in a way trying to prove yourself, and as an entertainer, you’re always in front of an audience. People say you’re only as good as your last performance.
Has there been a firm resolve in your life to maintain a sense of moderation in things?
Yes. As you get a little older and you get a little more mature, you should get a little wiser. You shouldn’t be as dumb as you were at twenty. I don’t have maybe the insecurity I did. I’m quite secure in what I do now and I know that what I do, I do well. And God knows I’ve got, materially, anything that anybody could ever want. So I don’t have that worry. Now to most people that would be serendipity, to be financially independent, but that doesn’t mean a thing, really, in the long run. Having not had it and then having had it all, I can say that I know the difference, and all that money gives you is the state of not having to worry about money. That’s all it gives you. Nothing else.
And along with money comes responsibility, you know, and how you handle it and what you do with it and what you make out of it. It doesn’t give you much else. It means that you have, as performers will call it [grinning slyly], “fuck you” money.
Now what does that mean? All that means is that I don’t have to do what I don’t want to do. Someone says, “We want you to go out and do the show” and you say [laughing], “Fuck you! I don’t have to do it.” And that’s very important for an entertainer because when you’re scrambling, you do everything. You take this, you do this show, just to pick up a few bucks. You need the exposure, you gotta go here, and you should show up at this party and you must do that.
Your self-esteem takes some hard knocks.
I think so — until you get to the point where you can say, “I don’t have to do that,” and so you can be selective in what you want to do. But you know, I’ve been very fortunate in this business. Whether I’m basically a lot happier now than I was then, I’m not sure. I’m not sure.
Being happy is always a process.
If you ask people what they want, they’ll always say they want happiness, but that’s not something you go out looking for. That comes to you as a result of what you’re doing. That should be the result of your family, your work and your accomplishments. If everything goes well, you should be reasonably happy. But you can’t go out and look for it.
So, all things considered, you’re happy with the way everything has turned out.
Yes, but well, you know, it depends. Do you have a capacity for happiness? A lot of people don’t have a capacity. I don’t know how big my capacity is. It’s not as big as a lot of people’s, but I’m getting better at it all the time. I think you should. I think as you get older you ought to get better at those things and get your priorities together to find out what really is important to you. To me, my work is important. And I think for a man generally, that’s probably true. You know they say for a woman, her marriage and the family life is more important, but I think that’s changing too. Women are now finding that what they do as a person is more important, but to a man, it’s always been his work. When I say work, I don’t mean career exclusively, but being up there is more important to me. The family is an important part of it, but it can’t be everything.
But you envision a time when there may be a radical change and you won’t be working on The Tonight Show anymore.
[Wistful] I want to be able to say that, and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to handle that. I say to myself, “Can I step away from The Tonight Show or entertainment and do something else and be happy?” Probably not, because I think once you’ve been exposed to something like this or you enjoy it, you can’t turn around and become an architect, you know, or say well, I’m going to just completely put that aside and try another career. I am involved in other things, other interests, businesswise, that I find fascinating. But I think I would always like to entertain. You know, it may not be The Tonight Show, but, my God, nothing lasts forever. It could’ve been a lot worse. But I can always have the concerts and do guest shots on other shows or do occasional shows myself, or maybe even a picture. [Laughter] Who knows?
All in all, it ain’t been a bad trip.
(Posted Mar 22, 1979)