
Do you remember the sheepish look he used to get when he'd told a joke that didn't fly? The way he couldn't keep a straight face when he put on the stupid turban to do the stupid Carnac the Magnificent routine? The affectionate-ironic intonation he gave to the name Burbank? Or, at the end of his opening monologue, the way he'd swing--with deliberate gracelessness--that imaginary golf club? He'd hate to have his comedy deconstructed, but it suggested so much more than just the tone of upper-middle-class leisure his show was meant to create. That he was just a duffer like you. That he'd just as soon be off playing golf as doing an inconsequential TV show. That he was in there swinging, anyhow. That the game was just beginning. That eventually we'd all go off to the clubhouse.
While Johnny Carson was host of NBC's "The Tonight Show," from 1962 until his retirement in 1992, we took all this for granted, as he meant us to. His gift was to make it all look easy, to get us to forget that this was the painstaking creation of a persona. He'd perfected his timing, his silent takes and his self-deprecation by studying such master comedians as Oliver Hardy and Jack Benny. (He used to impersonate Benny when he was in high school, and Carson's wife Joanna once said the only time she'd ever seen him cry was at Benny's funeral.) The "Johnny Carson" he invented was a guy who didn't take things too seriously, least of all himself, and who could be endlessly amused but never ruffled. All this made him the ideal companion through a lot of long nights. His era coincided with the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, the Watergate and Iran-contra scandals--times like these, when you were glad the news was over.
Carson's topical jokes showed a barometric sensitivity to shifts in the national mood--when his monologues made Richard Nixon their butt, that was the ball game--but equally important was the host's carefully crafted casualness and the show's changelessness: The New York Times's Frank Rich called it "as formulaic and reassuring as Kabuki." Always the banter with Doc Severinsen, the geriatric hepcat bandleader; always the deferential "heh-heh" from Carson's sidekick, Ed McMahon. It was the sort of theater-company-in-your-living-room Carson had grown up with, listening to the likes of Benny on the radio--McMahon seemed a deliberate homage to Benny's announcer Don Wilson--and while celebrity guests came and went, Carson and his troupe seemed like family. Some nights, that was all we had.
Naturally it was all artifice: that perfect evocation of a late-night mood began taping at 6:30 p.m. And Johnny Carson wasn't "Johnny Carson"; it was a distinction he hated to be questioned about. "Are we back to that?" he asked an interviewer in 1967. "My reputation for being cold and aloof, for being a loner and living in a shell and all that crap? Look, I'm an entertainer." The four marriages, the drinking problems--after a drunken-driving arrest in 1982, he had a cop bring him onstage--was that the real Johnny Carson? Not from where we sat. His art approached perfection; the rest was only life.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
");jQuery(this).remove()}) jQuery('.start-slider').owlCarousel({loop:!1,margin:10,nav:!0,items:1}).on('changed.owl.carousel',function(event){var currentItem=event.item.index;var totalItems=event.item.count;if(currentItem===0){jQuery('.owl-prev').addClass('disabled')}else{jQuery('.owl-prev').removeClass('disabled')} if(currentItem===totalItems-1){jQuery('.owl-next').addClass('disabled')}else{jQuery('.owl-next').removeClass('disabled')}})}})})ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7r7HWrK6enZtjsLC5jqOmoaaernqkrdGspqdlYW5%2FdnmRaWduZWFnf3Z%2FlA%3D%3D