The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson is an American television talk show broadcast by NBC. The show was the third installment of The Tonight Show. Hosted by Johnny Carson, it aired from October 1, 1962, to May 22, 1992, replacing Tonight Starring Jack Paar and was replaced by The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Ed McMahon served as Carson's sidekick and the show's announcer.
For its first decade, Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show was based at the RCA Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York City, with some episodes recorded at NBC Studios in Burbank, California; on May 1, 1972, the show moved to Burbank as its main venue with extended returns to New York for several weeks over the next 12 months. After May 1973, however, the show remained in Burbank exclusively until Carson's retirement.Carson brought the show back to Manhattan in November 1972 for three weeks and again in May 1973 for an additional three weeks. The show's house band, the NBC Orchestra, was led by Skitch Henderson, until 1966 when Milton Delugg took over, who was succeeded by Doc Severinsen less than a year later.
Carson's Tonight Show was the longest-running late-night show of all time. The show played a significant role in launching the careers of numerous comedians by introducing them to a national audience. The series was ranked as one of the greatest TV shows of all time in polls from 2002 and 2013.
Format Johnny Carson's Tonight Show established the modern format of the late-night talk show: a monologue sprinkled with a rapid-fire series of 16 to 22 one-liners (Carson had a rule of no more than three on the same subject) was sometimes followed by sketch comedy, then moving on to guest interviews and performances by musicians and stand-up comedians, in no fixed order. Occasionally, Carson interviewed prominent politicians such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Robert F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey, however Carson refused to discuss his personal political views on the show out of concern it might alienate his audience and resisted efforts from his writing staff, particularly head writer and admitted liberal Marshall Brickman, to include more political material in the show. Other regulars were selected for their entertainment or information value, in contrast to those who offered more cerebral conversation. Musical guests were chosen under the premise that viewers watching a show in the middle of the night would not appreciate raucous rock and roll or funk performances at a time most people were trying to sleep, and tended to favor musicians with a lighter or more traditional sound.
His preference for access to Hollywood stars caused the show's move to the West Coast on May 1, 1972. However, the show would continue to have episodes taped in New York until 1973 when production moved to Hollywood permanently. The Tonight Show would not return to New York until 2014 when Jimmy Fallon took the hosting reins. When asked about intellectual conversation on The Tonight Show, Carson and his staff invariably cited "Carl Sagan, Paul Ehrlich, Margaret Mead, Gore Vidal, Shana Alexander, Madalyn Murray O'Hair" as guests; one television critic stated, however, "he always presented them as if they were spinach for your diet when he did [feature such names]." Family therapist Carlfred Broderick appeared on the show ten times,"Carlfred B. Broderick, Noted Sociologist, Dies at 67", USC News, September 6, 1999. Retrieved April 30, 2017. and psychologist Joyce Brothers was one of Carson's most frequent guests. Carson, in general, did not feature prop comedy acts (Carson was not averse to using prop comedy himself); such acts, with Gallagher being a prominent example, more commonly appeared when guest hosts helmed the program.Episode 145 – Gallagher, WTF with Marc Maron, wtfpod.com
Carson almost never socialized with guests before or after the show; frequent interviewee Orson Welles recalled that Tonight Show employees were astonished when Carson visited Welles's dressing room to say hello before a show. In contrast to the avuncular mien (Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas) and loquacious erudition (Dick Cavett) evinced by his contemporaries, Carson was a comparatively "cool" host who only laughed when genuinely amused; additionally, it was not uncommon for him to abruptly cut short monotonous or embarrassingly inept interviewees. Mort Sahl recalled, "The producer crouches just off camera and 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 had gone wrong, like a pit stop at Le Mans." Actor Robert Blake once compared being interviewed by Carson to "facing the death squad" or "Broadway on opening night." Guests who told jokes that offended Carson or disrupted the show risked being blackballed and never being invited back unless a guest was hosting; Kevin Nealon and Howie Mandel both recalled jokes that went awry and had led to them never appearing on Carson-hosted episodes again. The publicity value of appearing on The Tonight Show was so great, however, that most guests were willing to subject themselves to the risk.
Show regulars Ed McMahon The series' announcer and Carson's sidekick was Ed McMahon, who from the first show would introduce Carson with a drawn-out "Here's Johnny!" (something McMahon was inspired to do by the overemphasized way he had introduced reporter Robert Pierpoint on the NBC Radio Network program Monitor). The catchphrase was heard nightly for 30 years, and ranked top of the TV Land poll of American TV catchphrases and quotes in 2006; it has been referenced in lots of media going from The Shining to Johnny Bravo to a "Weird Al" Yankovic album cut; it was even used for the character Johnny Cage in the video game series Mortal Kombat.
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 stated in a 1978 profile of Carson in The New Yorker that "the 'Tonight Show' is my staple diet, my meat and potatoes—I'm realistic enough to know that everything else stems from that." After a 1965 incident in which he ruined Carson's joke on the air, McMahon was careful to, as he said, "never to go where [Carson]'s going." He wrote in his 1998 autobiography:
Bandleaders and others
The Tonight Show had a live big band for nearly all of its existence. The NBC Orchestra during Carson's reign was originally 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 (this usually happened when a guest host substituted for Carson, which generally gave McMahon the night off as well). The series' instrumental theme music, "Johnny's Theme", was a re-arrangement of the Paul Anka composition "Toot Sweet", which Anka and Annette Funicello had separately recorded, with lyrics, as "It's Really Love". During shows when Newsom filled in for Severinsen, the band played a slightly truncated version of the theme that transitioned from the bridge to the closing phrase without reprising the first few notes of the main melody. The NBC Orchestra was the last in-house studio orchestra to perform on American television.
Behind the scenes, motion picture director/producer 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).
Dick Cavett was Carson's original head writer. He was succeeded by Marshall Brickman when Cavett left to pursue a stand-up career in 1964. The Tonight Show writing staff was structured so that the head writer was responsible for all of the material except for the nightly monologues, which the remainder of the staff handled; Brickman remarked in a 2009 interview that this was the main reason why he, at 25, got his position without any major experience, since all of the other writers under Cavett declined the offer. Brickman was succeeded as head writer by Hank Bradford, a writer and stand-up comedian who had performed his routine on the show multiple times in the 1960s, and who led The Tonight Show writing staff from 1970 to 1975. Pat McCormick carried over from Paar's hosting run and contributed both to the writing of jokes and with on-screen appearances.Thurber, Jon (July 30, 2005). "Pat McCormick, 78; Comedy Writer Had a Gift for Wacky Humor". Los_Angeles_Times.
Recurring segments and skits Characters
Carnac the Magnificent, in which Carson played a psychic who clairvoyantly divined the answer to a question contained in a sealed envelope. This was to some degree a variation on Steve Allen's recurring "The Question Man" sketch. The answer was always an outrageous pun. "Carnac" examples: "Debate" ... "What do you use to catch de fish?" "Baja" ... "What sound does a sheep make when it laughs?" "Ben-Gay" ... "Why didn't Mrs. Franklin have any kids?" "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou" ... "Name three things that have yeast." "Three Dog Night" ... "What's a bad night for a tree?" "Mount Baldy" ... "What did Yul Brynner's wife do on their wedding night?" also "How do you play 'horsey' with Don Rickles?" "Sis boom bah" ... "Describe the sound made when a sheep explodes." (Ed McMahon's personal favorite) If the laughter fell short when a line bombed (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!"
"Floyd R. Turbo," a dimwitted yokel responding to a TV station editorial. Floyd always spoke haltingly, as though reading from cue cards, and railed against some newsworthy topic, like Secretaries' Day: "This raises the question: Kiss my Dictaphone!" "Art Fern," the fast-talking host of a "Tea Time Movie" program, who advertised inane products, assisted by the attractive Matinee Lady, played by Paula Prentiss (late 1960s), Carol Wayne (the most familiar Matinee Lady, 1971–81, 1984), Danuta Wesley (1982), and Teresa Ganzel (1984–92). He imitated the vocal stylings of Jackie Gleason's character "Reginald Van Gleason". The fake movies Art would introduce usually had eclectic casts ("Ben Blue, Red Buttons, Jesse White, and Karen Black") and nonsensical titles ("Rin-Tin-Tin Gets Fixed Fixed Fixed"). This would be followed by a four-second stock film clip before coming back for another commercial, usually catching Art and the Matinee Lady in a very compromising position. On giving directions to a fake store he was touting, Fern would show a spaghetti-like road map, sometimes with a literal "fork in the road," other times making the joke, "Go to the Slauson Cutoff...," and the audience would recite with him, "...cut off your Slauson!" The character was previously named "Honest Bernie Schlock" and then "Ralph Willie" when the Tea Time sketches first aired in the mid-to-late 1960s. At least one surviving pre-1972 Art Fern sketch that originated from New York had its movie show title as "The Big Flick," an amalgam of two movie show titles in use at the time by New York station WOR-TV, The Big Preview and The Flick. On that sketch Lee Meredith was the Matinee Lady. Carson's Comedy Classics features an episode where Juliet Prowse is in the role of Matinee Lady, from 20 August 1971.