Johnny Carson has died, says the AP

I think the lack of appearances was his choice, though (except for not appearing on the first Leno show, according to that Late Shift movie). He just disappeared from the public eye entirely.

very sad, a really interesting person and everyone should read ken tynan's new yorker profile of him.

"He scans the assembly, his eyes twinkling like icicles. Hard to believe, despite the pewter-colored hair, that he is fifty-one: he holds himself like the midshipman he once was, chin well tucked in, back as straight as a poker."

Keep in mind, this is MOZ ANGELES in 1992. Moz fever was a full pandemic in southern California. The entire studio audience was there primarily to see Morrissey do "Sing Your Life", and whenever Carson would say "Morrissey" in his intro, he'd feint being hit by a brick wall as the audience went nuts.. and he'd bait the audience even further by repeating the same. Even funnier was when Cosby baited the audience after the performance when he was telling his stories about how he was backstage with Morrissey, and commanded the audience to do Cosby's bidding because "Morrissey told him to".

It was a GREAT bow out for Carson, and a weird and great document that really bridges two generations succinctly and neatly.

-- s1ocki

Yes, I heard he wrote the opening monologue for Dave on the night that he returned after Paul Schaffer guest-hosted. Dave basically roasted Paul, it was very funny stuff.

"Fifteen years of the Salto Mortale", it's a great profile, and almost entirely responsible for the shock I felt when I heard the news (as I've never actually seen The Tonight Show).

The cause was emphysema.

Mr. Carson took over “The Tonight Show” from Jack Paar on Oct. 1, 1962, and, preferring to retire at the top of his game, voluntarily surrendered it to Jay Leno on May 22, 1992. During those three decades, between 10 million and 15 million Americans could not sleep weeknights unless they were reassured by the durable and droll Mr. Carson. The critic Bill McKibben called him the "nation’s emotional thermostat, readjusting our mood every night so we could go to sleep.” Billy Wilder, the film director and wit, regarded him as “the valium and nembutal of the nation.”

During his reign, Mr. Carson was one of the most powerful performers on television, discovering new talent, rescuing old performers from oblivion and earning millions of dollars for his network, the National Broadcasting Company. In his heyday he generated approximately 17 percent of the network’s total profit and was, by any reasonable assessment, its most lustrous star since Toscanini. He held an overwhelming majority of the late-night viewers in the palm of his hand and his show was the biggest single money-maker in NBC history.

In a celebrated New Yorker profile, Kenneth Tynan said of Mr. Carson that he practiced ”the art of the expected.” Americans were reassured when Doc Severinsen, the show’s bandleader, would start up the show’s bouncy theme song (written by Paul Anka and Mr. Carson himself), Ed McMahon, the jovial announcer, would intone “Heeeeere’s Johnny” and prepare to guffaw at every joke Mr. Carson ever told, and the dapper host would appear to deliver his nightly monologue, a tour de force that the critic Les Brown called “America’s bedtime story.”

In his monologue and in his time, Mr. Carson impaled the foibles of seven presidents and their aides (Vice President Dan Quayle was a favorite target), as well as the doings of assorted nabobs and stuffed shirts from the private sector: corporate footpads and secret polluters, tax evaders, preening lawyers, idiosyncratic doctors, oily accountants, defendants who got off too easy and celebrities who talked too much.

All these oddments were sliced and diced so neatly, so politely, so unmaliciously, with so much alacrity, that even the stuffiest conservative Republicans found themselves almost smiling at Carson’s Nixon-Agnew jokes and uptight doctrinaire liberal Democrats savored his pokes at Lyndon B. Johnson and the Kennedys. The public could not say whether they were on Johnny Carson’s side or he was on theirs. All they knew was they liked him and felt they knew him, an audacious claim not even his wives and next door neighbors cared to make. White, male and Protestant, Mr. Carson’s scrubbed Midwestern presence was so appealing that he succeeded in unifying a fractious nation that otherwise seemed ununifiable.

Just as frequently Mr. Carson turned his agile wit on himself: on his numerous unsuccessful marriages and pricey divorces; his powerlessness at the hands of Con Edison workers who worked under his apartment window on Manhattan’s East Side when he tried to sleep (he claimed they were carting New York away, piece by piece, to New Jersey); and on his vulnerability to the people who employed him.

Mr. Carson guarded his political views as carefully as he did his private life, insisting that the only message of his show was entertainment. But his credibility with the American public was such that his monologues were carefully monitored by politicians mindful that no politician who became a frequent target of Johnny Carson could long survive in public life. It did not help Richard Nixon when Mr. Carson’s monologue produced some of the funniest Watergate jokes around. Nor did it help when Mr. Carson trained his sights on former Senator Gary Hart, a Democrat from Colorado who found allure in both the presidency and in women he did not happen to be married to. Mr. Carson’s jokes about Mr. Hart’s extramarital activities were surely not the only reason his political fortunes evaporated in 1992 but they were repeated often enough to have played some part.

The more I think about this, the sadder I get. I wonder if Johnny watched the rise of the Freepers in U.S. politics and think, "Every one of those gasbags is Floyd R. Turbo in the flesh."

Who's a man that we admire?
Johnny Carson is a real live wire.
Who's a man that we admire?
Johnny Carson is a real live wire.
Who's a man that we admire?
Johnny Carson is a real live wire.
Who's the man that we admire?
Johnny Carson is a real live wire

yeah, thanks, i couldn't remember the name! great title for the piece, taken, as you know, from a comment about carson made by none other than billy wilder.

This is actually surprising to me -- I suspect it shouldn't be, obviously he was there all that time for a reason, but it's still striking to read.

My own period of watching him semi-regularly was the mid-eighties or so, once my parents regularly let me stay up to later hours, but even then I usually cut out after the monologue and opening bits. Still, good stuff -- he had his stand-by characters and jokes but he clearly had the background to know what worked and what didn't.

I remember my college roommates and friends generally picking Arsenio Hall in the late eighties and early nineties, for understandable enough reasons, and though I wasn't much in the late night TV habit by that point (I should note I *never* actually watched Letterman in his NBC years, which I think made me unique) I went along with it. But it has to be said that those last two episodes Carson did -- the closer, certainly, but even better the Robin Williams/Bette Midler penultimate episode, particularly when Carson and Midler did the duet out of nowhere -- were mighty fine. Like the article said, top of his game.

there was alot of cheap cocaine around in the late eighties and early nineties.

The guy knew how to retire.

As for the emphysema: He was a smoker. He smoked on the show for many years. It's hard to imagine a tv host with a butt these days, but attitudes toward smoking were different in the 60s and 70s.

Here's to someone who not only belonged in showbiz but who also gave so much to it, especially when it came to the comedy world.

He made someone as loose and freewheeling as '80s Letterman necessary, as an antidote. At least he boosted him and Shandling.

Scour the obits for this urban legend: Raquel Welch goes on "Tonight" with a kittycat in lap, and asks Carson "Would you like to pet my pussy?"

Indeed. On a 120 foot yacht.

http://www.biwa.ne.jp/~presley/celeb/JohnnyCarson.jpg

http://www2.intop.net/~pbusby/carson1.jpg

(And Howard fucking Stern is exposing him? After his hours and hours of AIDS jokes in the '80s?)

I'm completely ambivalent towards Carson's passing; I would say he'll be missed but he's been missed since he retired.

(I have bad comedy on the brain right now, having gone off on a rant not long ago about a terrible stand-up, minutes before realizing I'd gone to college with him.)

Ah, and there's the clip again now. It's like a high school principal giving the graduation speech (but without turning into a giant snake).

http://www.panopticist.com/archives/12.html

here is the formula:

"you know, i read in the paper today that (strange thing)"

"but you know what was really weird?"

*beat*

"(anticlimactic and possibly scatological punchline)"

audience fails to laugh, or does so pityingly; host laughs at self for being unfunny; that is almost always the real joke, that this regular, dorky guy can go up here on tv and be unfunny in front of a nation of millions

(ps black comedians don't get away with that)

http://newyorker.com/archive/content/?050124fr_archive03

http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/show_info/

Watching really old B&W vid of Carson and seeing him with a lit cigarette on-camera is weird.

Carson's lawyer (referred to on Tonight as Bombastic Bushkin) has written a tell-all:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/16/books/johnny-carson-henry-bushkins-tell-all.html

Saw this thread, was like oh, that's too bad -- then learned he died eight years ago!

Pretty fascinating TV column by Tom Shales from 1979, when Carson was feuding with NBC and threatening to leave. His handicapping of replacements is amusing, but his evaluation of Johnny is spot-on.

As Marshall McLuhan said, "High-definition" personalities cannot last long in television. Johnny is about as low a definition as you can get. If he got any lower, he wouldn't even register as an image on a TV picture tube.

The Johnny apparition we see on the screen has no style, spine or spleen; we can connect the dots and make of him what we want. He is always bright, but never brilliant. Would we be able to stand the wittiness of a Noel Coward or a Dorothy Parker, night after night, in our bedroom? No....

In airport acronym parlance, Carson put the show firmly on the LAX-LAS axis; one of the reasons he couldn't do the show live, as he wanted to a couple of years ago, was that so many of his guests are simultaneously playing Las Vegas and couldn't make their shows and Johnny's too. About the only political guest Carson tolerates now is Mr. Granola, Jerry Brown, who sails in on the same cloud as Orson Bean and Joan Rivers.

Paar is remembered for fits of temperament and rancor. These were a very small part of his program. He was a genuine conversationalist who brought out the best in a wide variety of raconteurs and cast jaundiced eyes at the pretty but empty. When Carson entertains a guest like Robert Morley or Orson Welles, he hasn't the talent to get them going on an anecdotal joy ride of their own because he is too busy plotting his next laugh.

In person, Carson is a cold, glum and suspicious man. He has been knwon to refuse the use of tape recorders during interviews because he fears the tape will be released as a commercial record (someone did try to make, with his permission, a "Tonight Show" LP and it was a colossal commercial bust). On the air he appears a man of no convictions - other than that the horse is smarter than the pig - or backbone, except that he will attempt stunts and let big insects crawl up his arm.

We will be losing a great deal when Carson leaves "The Tonight Show," but it shouldn't take more than three nights to recover and forget him completely.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1979/04/26/the-cloning-of-carson/87705102-0166-483c-a3ec-24af767d0741/

Have no memory of this kind of criticism of Carson while he was still on TV. Seemed untouchable.

well by 1990 he was antique enough for Dana Carvey's SNL mockery. "That is... wild... stuff."

The New Yorker link up there is dead, so here's a more permanent-seeming one: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1978/02/20/fifteen-years-salto-mortale

Only had time to re-skim the epic Tynan piece, but it brought back to me how funny and relatively offbeat JC's parrying with Buck Henry was.

Floyd R. Turbo is the President now.

carson isn't the best late-night interviewer from back in the day (from what i've seen, dick cavett was the best), but he sure is better than anyone i can think of now. every time i see an old carson episode it's p much guaranteed to be more entertaining than all the leno/fallon episodes i've seen combined. (don't think i ever actually caught any of conan's episodes when he was the host.)

conan was too restless and hyperactive to be a good interviewer

geez he still has a show guys

RIP conan

oh, Carson was better than that slop, J.D.

Cavett had his moments but was often insufferable (see Rick Moranis' impression on SCTV)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW0_npkgG_M

Strange to watch him doing Yankees sports jokes like a local news anchor.

The Yanks were real celebrities then. Less than in the late 50s, sure, but still

Either I'm old or that whole Yankees bit was funny.

I must have thought that he and Ed McMahon and Doc Severinsen were attached at the hip, but I think I do remember him making occasional mention of Skitch Henderson. Don't know the announcer at all.

watched some Rodney Dangerfield clips on the Tonight Show the other day (the likes of Dom Deluise, Burt Reynolds in a tite romper, on the couch. whatta time to be alive). They are all about 5 years apart—early 70s, late 70s, mid 80s. Watching Rod in a flop sweat making a mostly unflappable Johnny break w even repeated jokes and well-hewn rhythms was truly a pleasure.

There needs to be some kind of "Carnac of the Day" virtual calendar app. Until then, the most famous bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76wzA2A2T1Q

O snap he died again?

We went to see a taping of the Johnny Carson show when I was like nine years old but they wouldn’t let me in bc I was too young. So my mom, brother and sister went while me and my dad sat sadly outside. At some point a guy walks up and ask if we want to come watch a new kids show they’re filming in a nearby studio. We agreed. It was one of the first episodes of saved by the bell

Score

Was hoping you'd say the Pee Wee Herman Show, but still good.

crazy that Uri Geller is still alive

he's just 79. prob has a few years before he croaks.

i don't mean because of his age, i mean because he seemingly belongs to a long ago era

I was on a What’s My Line? binge not long ago and now there’s a show where it’s jarring to occasionally see a panelist who’s still with us.

Years ago we had cash, hope, jobs, cars-on

I'm pretty sure the earliest appearing mystery guest from What's My Line? who is still with us is actress Terry Moore, who appeared in a March 1955 episode when she was 26, and now she's 97.

The second earliest would be Kim Novak, who was on in February 1956 when she was 22 and now she's 92.

Man. If you say so!

I watched every available episode of the original series in chronological order (thanks to someone who collected them all and put them on YouTube) and I was kind of noting who was still alive as it went along. Now, the question of which panelists are still alive is a different one. None of the regular or semi-regular panelists from the original series are still with us, if I'm not mistaken. A bunch of the guest panelists who were on maybe once, maybe two or three times or whatever, are still with us. Among these would Woody Allen, Paul Anka, Jane Fonda, Carol Burnett, and Joan Collins.

Carnac has to be one of the greatest rolling bits in television history

"all omniscient" is an underrated line

doc severinsen still alive wow, 97!

The thing I liked most about Johnny Carson was that way that when guests were boring, he took up the slack. He was such a natural guy. He spoke in such a manly tone. The network made him break his back, but he was a real live wire.

Ashley Pomeroy secret American?