| The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson | |
|---|---|
| Format | Talk show Variety show |
| Created by | Sylvester L. Weaver, Jr. |
| Starring | Johnny Carson ANNOUNCER: Ed McMahon BANDLEADER: Doc Severinsen (1967–1992) Tommy Newsom (Substitute) (1968–1992) Milton DeLugg (1966–1967) Skitch Henderson (1962–1966) HEAD WRITER Raymond Siller (1974–1989) |
| Country of origin | United States |
| No. of seasons | 30 |
| No. of episodes | 4531 (List of episodes) |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) | Fred de Cordova |
| Running time | 105 minutes (1962–1966) 90 minutes (1967–1980) 60 minutes (1980–1991) 62 minutes (1991–1992) |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | NBC |
| Original run | October 1, 1962 – May 22, 1992 |
| Chronology | |
| Preceded by | Tonight Starring Jack Paar (1957–1962) |
| Followed by | The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (1992–2009; 2010–present) |
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson is a talk show hosted by Johnny Carson under the Tonight Show franchise from 1962 to 1992.[1] It originally aired during late-night.
For its first 10 years Carson's Tonight Show was based in New York City with occasional trips to Burbank, California; in May 1972 the show moved permanently to Burbank.[2]
In 2002, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was ranked #12 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.[3]
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Carson's show established the modern structure of a late-night talk show: A monologue peppered with a rapid-fire series of 16 to 22 one-liner jokes—never more than two consecutively on the same subject[4]—regular use of sketch comedy, and guest interviews. While his early guests included John F. and Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, Carson turned Tonight guest chair into a place for people who had a book, movie, television show, or stage performance to promote. While some regular guests like Don Rickles would not come on solely to promote something, these regulars were usually selected for their comedic value, in contrast to predecessor Jack Paar's preference for more cerebral conversation. (When asked about intellectual conversation on Tonight, Carson and his staff invariably cited "Carl Sagan, Paul Ehrlich, Margaret Mead, Gore Vidal, Shana Alexander, Madalyn Murray O'Hair" as guests.[4])
Carson almost never socialized with guests before or after the show; frequent interviewee Orson Welles recalled that Tonight employees were amazed when Carson once visited his dressing room to say hello before a show. Unlike his more avuncular competitors Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, and Dick Cavett, Carson was a precise, "chill[y]" host who only laughed when genuinely amused and quickly ended interviews with uninteresting guests. Mort Sahl recalled, "The producer is crouching just off camera, and he holds up a card that says, ‘Go to commercial.’ So Carson goes to a commercial, and the whole team rushes up to his desk to discuss what went wrong. It’s like a pit stop at Le Mans." Robert Blake compared being interviewed by Carson to "facing death" and "Broadway on opening night." The publicity value of appearing on Tonight was so great, however, that most guests were willing to take the risk; David Brenner was one of many celebrities who credited Carson for his success.[4]
The show's announcer and Carson's sidekick was Ed McMahon, who from the very first show would introduce Carson with a drawn-out "Heeeeeeeeere's Johnny!" (something McMahon was inspired to do by the overemphasized way he had introduced reporter Robert Pierpoint on the NBC Radio show Monitor). McMahon, who held the same role in Carson's ABC game show Who Do You Trust? for five years previously, would remain standing to the side as Carson did his monologue, laughing (sometimes obsequiously) at his jokes, then join him at the guest chair when Carson moved to his desk. The two would usually interact in a comic spot for a short while before the first guest was introduced.
McMahon commented on his role in his 1998 autobiography:
| “ | My role on the show never was strictly defined. I did what had to be done when it had to be done. I was there when he needed me, and when he didn't I moved down the couch and kept quiet. ... I did the audience warm-up, I did commercials, for a brief period I co-hosted the first fifteen minutes of the show..., and I performed in many sketches. On our thirteenth-anniversary show Johnny and I were talking at his desk and he said, "Thirteen years is a long time." Long enough for me to recognize my cue. So, I asked, "how long is it?" "That's why you're here," he said, probably summing up my primary role on the show perfectly...I had to support him, I had to help him get to the punch line, but while doing it I had to make it look as if I wasn't doing anything at all. The better I did it, the less it appeared as if I was doing it....If I was going to play second fiddle, I wanted to be the Heifetz of second fiddlers....The most difficult thing for me to learn how to do was just sit there with my mouth closed. Many nights I'd be listening to Johnny and in my mind I'd reach the same adlib just as he said it. I'd have to bite my tongue not to say it out loud. I had to make sure I wasn't too funny—although critics who saw some of my other performances will claim I needn't have worried. If I got too many laughs, I wasn't doing my job; my job was to be part of a team that generated the laughs.[5] | ” |
The Tonight Show had a live band for nearly all of its existence. The NBC Orchestra during Carson's reign was led by Skitch Henderson (who had previously led the band during Tonight Starring Steve Allen), followed briefly by Milton DeLugg. Starting in 1967 and continuing until Jay Leno took over, the band was led by Doc Severinsen, with Tommy Newsom filling in for him when he was absent or filling in for McMahon as the announcer (which usually happened when a guest host substituted for Carson, which usually gave McMahon the night off as well). The show's instrumental theme music, "Johnny's Theme", was a re-arrangement of a Paul Anka composition called "Toot Sweet".
Behind the scenes, Fred de Cordova joined The Tonight Show in 1970 as producer, graduating to executive producer in 1984. Unlike many people of his position, de Cordova often appeared on the show, bantering with Carson from his chair off-camera (though occasionally a camera would be pointed in his direction).
The Carnac joke that garnered the biggest laugh, and Ed McMahon's personal favorite, as he discussed on several talk shows:
If the laughter fell short for a too-lame pun (as it often did), "Carnac" would face the audience with mock seriousness and bestow a comic curse: "May a diseased yak befriend your sister!" or "May a rabid holy man bless your nether regions with a power tool!"
Jack Paar's last appearance was on March 29, 1962, and due to Carson's previous contracts, Carson did not take over until October 1. The first guests were Rudy Vallée, Tony Bennett, Mel Brooks, and Joan Crawford. Carson inherited from Paar a show that was 105 minutes long.[4] The show was structured to have what appeared to be two openings, with one starting at 11:15 p.m. and including the monologue, and another which listed the guests and announced the host again, starting at 11:30. The two openings gave affiliates the option of having either a fifteen-minute or thirty-minute local newscast preceding Carson. Since 1959, the show had been videotaped earlier the same broadcast day.
As more affiliates introduced thirty minutes of local news, Carson's monologue was being seen by fewer people. To rectify this situation, from February 1965 to December 1966, Ed McMahon and Skitch Henderson began to co-host the first fifteen minutes of the show without Carson, who then took over at 11:30. Finally, because he wanted the show to start when he came on, Carson insisted on eliminating the 11:15 segment at the beginning of January 1967 (which, he once claimed in a monologue at the time, no one actually watched "except the Armed Forces and four Indians in Gallup, New Mexico").
By the mid-1970s Tonight was the most profitable television show, making NBC $50 to $60 million ($168,321,000 to $201,986,000 today) each year.[4] Carson influenced the scheduling of reruns (which typically aired under the title The Best of Carson) in the mid-1970s and, later in 1980, the length of each evening's broadcast by threatening NBC with, in the first case, moving to another network, and in the latter retiring altogether. In order to enable a shorter work week for himself, Carson began to petition network executives in 1974 that reruns on the weekends be discontinued, in favor of showing them on one or more nights during the week. In response to his demands, NBC began planning a new comedy/variety series to feed to affiliates on Saturday nights that debuted in October 1975 and is still airing today: Saturday Night Live. Five years later, Carson renewed his contract with a stipulation that the show lose its last half hour; Tom Snyder's Tomorrow expanded to 90 minutes in order to fill the resulting schedule gap. Although a year and a half later Tomorrow gave way to the hour-long Late Night with David Letterman (1982–1993), an hour remains the length of Tonight.
The show's start time was delayed by five minutes to allow NBC affiliates to include more commercials during their local newscasts.
In his tribute episode after Carson's death, David Letterman revealed that because of the great success of the Tonight Show, every talk show host since then – himself included – is secretly emulating Carson during his Tonight Show days.[6]
In 1979, when Fred Silverman was the head of NBC, Carson took the network to court claiming that he had been a free-agent since April of that year because his most recent contract had been signed in 1972. Carson cited a California law barring certain contracts from lasting more than seven years. NBC claimed that they had signed three agreements since then, and Carson was therefore bound to the network until April 1981.[7] While the case was settled out of court,[8] the friction between Carson and the network remained. Eventually, Carson reached an agreement to appear four nights a week but cut the show from 90 to 60 minutes.[9] In September 1980, Carson's eponymous production company regained ownership of the show[10][11] after owning it from 1969 to the early 1970s.[4]
Virtually all of the original pre-1970 video recordings, including Carson's debut as host, are now considered lost.[4] Following the standard procedure for most television production companies of that era, NBC reused the Tonight Show videotapes for recording other programs. It was rumored that many other episodes were lost in a fire, but NBC has denied this. Other surviving material from the era has been found on kinescopes held in the archives of the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, or in the personal collections of guests of the program, while a few moments such as Tiny Tim's wedding, were preserved. New York meteorologist Dr. Frank Field, an occasional guest during the years he was weather forecaster for WNBC-TV, showed several clips of his appearances with Carson in a 2002 career retrospective on WWOR-TV; Field had maintained the clips in his own personal archives.
The program archive is virtually complete from 1973 to 1992.[12] The New York Post reported in May 2011 that 250 of Carson's monologues and sketches spanning a 20-year period are on the Memory Lane website.[13]
A large amount of material from Carson's first two decades of the Tonight Show (1962–1982), (much of it not seen since its original airings) appeared in a half hour "clip/compilation" syndicated program known as Carson's Comedy Classics which aired in 1983.
Although no footage is known to remain of Carson's first broadcast as host of The Tonight Show on October 1, 1962, photographs taken that night do survive—including Carson being introduced by Groucho Marx – as does an audio recording of Marx's introduction and Carson's first monologue. One of his first jokes upon starting the show (after receiving a few words of encouragement from Marx, one of which was "Don't go to Hollywood") was to pretend to panic and say, "I want my Na-Na!". (This recording was played at the start of Carson's final broadcast on May 22, 1992.) The oldest surviving video recording of the show is dated November 1962, while the oldest surviving color recording is from 1963, when Carson had Jake Ehrlich Sr. as guest.[14]
Thirty-minute audio recordings of many of these "missing" episodes are contained in the Library of Congress in the Armed Forces Radio collection. Many 1970s-era episodes have been licensed to distributors that advertise mail order offers on late-night TV. The later shows are stored in an underground salt mine in Kansas.
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson had guest hosts each Monday for most of the show's run and sometimes for entire weeks during Johnny's frequent vacations. The following list is of those who guest hosted at least 50 times during the first 21 years of the show's run; it does not count the episodes hosted by the three "permanent guest hosts": Joan Rivers (1983–1986),[15] Garry Shandling (1986–1987), and Jay Leno (1987–1992).[15]
Carson had been an occasional guest host during the years when Jack Paar was the regular host, and Paar repeatedly claimed he had been the one to suggest to NBC that Carson replace him when he left the show in 1962.
On April 2, 1979, Kermit the Frog was guest-host.[17] Additionally, many other Muppets appeared for skits and regular segments: Frank Oz voiced Fozzie Bear and Animal, while Jerry Nelson voiced a Vincent Price-based Muppet during a segment with the real Price.
In September 1983, Joan Rivers was designated Carson's permanent guest host, a role she had been essentially filling for more than a year before then. In 1986, she abruptly left for her own show on the then-new Fox Network. This move — and her failure to inform him personally — infuriated Carson so much that he banned Rivers from his show, canceling even the three weeks of guest hosting she was scheduled to do in the remainder of the 1985–86 television season. Rivers' new show was quickly canceled, and she never appeared on The Tonight Show with Carson again. She never appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno either, a ban instigated by Leno out of respect for Carson.[18] After Carson's death, Rivers told CNN that Carson never forgave her for leaving, and never spoke to her again, even after she wrote him a note following the [June 1991] accidental death of Carson's son Ricky.[16]
The program of July 26, 1984, with guest host Joan Rivers, was the first MTS stereo broadcast in U.S. television history,[19] though not the first television broadcast with stereophonic sound. Only the New York City affiliate of NBC had stereo broadcast capability at that time.[20] NBC transmitted The Tonight Show in stereo sporadically through 1984, and on a regular basis beginning in 1985.
As his retirement approached, Carson tried to avoid sentimentality, but would periodically show clips of some of his favorite moments and host again some of his favorite guests. He told his crew, "Everything comes to an end; nothing lasts forever. Thirty years is enough. It's time to get out while you're still working on top of your game, while you're still working well."[21]
On May 21, 1992, the eve of Carson's last show, he hosted his final guests, Robin Williams and Bette Midler.[22] It was also the final show before a regular studio audience; fans, who had been camping out to get into the final shows, waited up to 35 hours to get into this one.[21][23] Once underway, the atmosphere was electric and Carson was greeted with a sustained, two-minute ovation at the start.[23] Williams displayed an especially uninhibited take on his trademark manic energy and stream-of-consciousness lunacy.[21][24] Midler, in contrast, found the emotional vein of the farewell.[24] When the conversation turned to Johnny's favorite songs – "I'll Be Seeing You" and "Here's That Rainy Day" – Midler mentioned she knew a chorus of the latter. She began singing the song, and after the first line, Carson joined in and turned it into an impromptu duet. Midler finished her appearance from center stage, where she slowly sang the pop standard "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)". Carson became unexpectedly tearful, and a shot of the two of them was captured by a camera angle from across the set which had never been used before.[25] The audience became tearful as well, and called the three performers out for a second bow after the show completed.[23] This penultimate show was immediately recognized as a television classic, and Midler would consider it one of the most emotional moments of her life and would win an Emmy Award for her role in it.[24][25][26]
Carson had no guests on his final episode of The Tonight Show on May 22, 1992, which was instead a retrospective show taped before an invitation-only studio audience of family, friends, and crew.[21][22] An estimated 50 million people tuned in for the finale, which ended with Carson sitting on a stool alone on the stage, similar to Jack Paar's last show. He gave these final words of goodbye:
| “ | And so it has come to this: I, uh... am one of the lucky people in the world; I found something I always wanted to do and I have enjoyed every single minute of it. I want to thank the gentlemen who've shared this stage with me for thirty years. Mr. Ed McMahon, Mr. Doc Severinsen, and you people watching. I can only tell you that it has been an honor and a privilege to come into your homes all these years and entertain you. And I hope when I find something that I want to do and I think you would like and come back that you'll be as gracious in inviting me into your home as you have been. I bid you a very heartfelt good night. | ” |
A few weeks after the final show aired, it was announced that NBC and Carson had struck a deal to develop a new series. Ultimately, however, he chose never to return to television with another show of his own. He gave only two major interviews after retiring: one to the Washington Post in 1993, and the other to Esquire magazine in 2002. Carson hinted in his 1993 interview that he did not think he could top what he had already accomplished. He also made only a couple of on-screen appearances after retiring, including providing a guest voice on an episode of The Simpsons and making a silent cameo appearance on Late Show with David Letterman.
In 2011, the last show was ranked #10 on the TV Guide Network special, TV's Most Unforgettable Finales.[27]
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