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Carson wasn't as original
as the tributes suggest
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
The major triumph of--and the major flaw with--Johnny Carson was that, during his 30-year-reign, “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” was pretty much the same every night. It was usually good and always mildly entertaining, with the emphasis on mildly. It was never truly lousy but it was rarely great, inspired, interesting or challenging.
Carson struck exactly the right note of what now passes in America for TV entertainment--not too hot, not too cool, not too off-center, not too simple-minded, with just the right tone of acceptable off-color blue. Much like Bob Hope, a Cleveland lad, Carson’s own middle-American, middle-brow sensibility served him well his entire career. He was his audience, never above it or beneath it, the secret to showbiz longevity.
You could rely on the show being as steady as its unflappable host, but it lacked the true flights of nervy genius under Steve Allen’s stewardship of the show or the quirky character it had under the nervous hand of the jangled Jack Paar. Under Carson, the “Tonight” show became the Holiday Inn of late-night talk shows for three decades--no surprises.
That reliability is what kept NBC happy and kept Carson hosting the show for 30 years, a record run that likely will never be surpassed, and it’s what kept people tuning in. Carson was a total professional--a keen ad libber, a gracious host, a good judge of talent--but there was no there there, no real persona except for the cultivated image of the boyish host, always a bit above the fray, looking on, the remote Gatsby of late-night TV.
As someone said, the famously impersonal host always seemed to be playing Johnny Carson. Perhaps that un-knowability helped keep Carson such an engaging presence. People would always wonder, What is Jack Paar really like, but with Carson, what you saw was what you got, the whole charming but ultimately vague package. He managed the trick of being on the air every night for 30 years without wearing out his welcome; he trod lightly, refusing offers to further market himself beyond a line of clothes. He made few guest appearances and took no roles beyond playing himself.
The show became so much a midnight ritual that there was really very little need to watch it once Johnny had finished his monologue--a condition that holds true now with Jay Leno, his equally polished and uninspired successor, and only a little less so with the guarded if hipper David Letterman. Even though Jack Paar drove you crazy with his tics, stammer and tantrums, his unpredictability at least made him seem like a real person. Carson was so remote, so tightly wound, so bloodless, that he was hard to truly love or hate. He was almost a wind-up figure, as Rich Little’s impression revealed.
In this respect, the carefully controlled show was a reflection of its host, who played everything, his real feelings and his personal life, close to the vest, unlike the gloriously and hilariously unbuttoned Allen, the petulant basket case Paar, and the regular guy Leno, who, before he took over the show’s reins, had much sharper material. Something about the show tends to knock the edges off its hosts and sand them down. Mort Sahl once cracked that Johnny’s new multi-million contract with NBC stipulated that Carson didn’t have to do the show every night but he had to watch it.
Under Carson, the show’s opening 20 minutes was as choreographed as a tea-serving ceremony, as ritualized as a religious rite--from Ed McMahon’s wind-up intro, to Doc Severinsen’s courtly houseboy bow, to Johnny’s trademark joke (“It was so hot today in LA that…” “How hot was it??”) to the golf swing that concluded every monologue, to McMahon’s genuine guffaws and half-kidding deference to the boss.
If you grew up watching
the “Tonight” show with Steve Allen and Jack Paar,
Carson’s version was much too polite and restrained and
predictable, at times almost boring, and it set the style for
late-night shows that continues to this day--a relentless parade
of starlets and pop flavors of the week hawking their wares;
any pretext at real conversation ended during Carson’s reign.
There is the occasionally daring confrontation (Drew Barrymore
flashing Letterman, Hugh Grant confessing to Leno his encounter
with a Sunset Strip hooker) or what seems a calculated attempt
at dumbed-down whimsy (Letterman’s dada-esque dialogue with
the deli and gift-shop owners next door, as opposed to Paar’s
bright chats with genuine wits like Oscar Levant, Robert Morley
or Alexander King. Leno’s and Letterman’s desperate
forays into zaniness came so easily to Steve Allen.
Like Leno and Letterman, Carson protégés, but unlike Allen and Paar and Dick Cavett, Johnny wasn’t truly curious about his guests. He just wanted them to give him 10 minutes of empty amusement. Carson’s guests were usually just sexy or goofy props, like the zoo animals he liked to play stooge for and that gave him an occasional moment of unrehearsed high jinx.
Carson was a consummate cool monologist, with a droll array of deadpan takes frankly stolen from Jack Benny, but he was a limited performer away from the curtain. Over 30 years, he never got any better as a sketch actor and even his stand-up characters were only minimally amusing and unabashedly swiped from other comedians.
He blatantly lifted his Aunt Blabby character from Jonathan Winters’ most famous creation, Maude Frickert (including her black spinster dress and wig); his TV pitchman Art Fern was a version of Jackie Gleason’s late-night spieler (he even lifted the name “Fern,” a favorite Steve Allenism), and Johnny’s swami Carnac the Magnificent was a wholesale theft of Steve Allen’s Question Man routine. The Mighty Carson Art Players was based on Fred Allen’s old Mighty Allen Art Players.
Carson was utterly shameless about all of this ruthless comic larceny, or maybe he just thought that comic characters, no matter how identified with another performer, are in the public domain. Whatever the reason, it reveals a fairly bankrupt comic imagination, not to mention astonishing chutzpah. Steve Allen told me that he never confronted Carson about the Question Man theft but finally just threw up his hands in exasperation.
Winters simply let Carson get away with his Aunt Blabby routine rather than jeopardize his bookings. He was a Carson favorite and Winters once told me that Carson would “play with me” without competing, unlike Letterman, who kept interrupting a bit.
Like Allen, Carson genuinely loved other comedians and felt no sense of rivalry - unless he felt they had betrayed him, as in the infamous Joan Rivers business, when Rivers says she learned she was not on the short list as a permanent fill-in host and signed to do her own late-night talk show on Fox. Carson, rather than wish her well, went into a childish pique and banned her from his show for life.
The show lost most of its New York edge and sizzle when Carson moved it to Burbank in 1972, after which it settled into the predictable rut that lasted until 1992, when he retired. It seemed like the end of one 30-year show, not 3,000 shows.
To call Carson’s “Tonight” show a “talk show” was a slight misnomer, at least compared to Allen and Paar, because the talk was largely scripted and was pitched at the most banal, innocuous level, the only purpose of which was (a) promote a guest’s upcoming gig or (b) lead into a bit. The most you could hope for was a double entendre, which Carson could neatly milk, or a rare moment of unrehearsed hilarity, as in the famous Ed Ames tomahawk toss that was replayed so often in Carson retrospectives and recent tributes that you wondered if it was the only such unscripted incident in 30 years.
Carson was the best at what he did, but he might have done so much more with a nightly forum that too often aimed at nothing more than a few laughs. Maybe that’s enough of a legacy, but maybe it says more about America and TV than about Johnny Carson, who defined the network credo of giving the public what it thinks it wants.
©2005 by Gerald Nachman. The illustration is ©2005 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted on Jan. 27, 2005.
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