One of the greatest magic tricks I ever saw unfolded when Johnny Carson invited the illusionist Uri Geller on “The Tonight Show” to bend a spoon with his mind.
This now notorious 1973 episode is best known for Geller’s failures. It has emerged over the years that staff members from “The Tonight Show” consulted with a magician, James Randi, who advised them on how to prepare the props to stymie him. It worked. For 20 excruciating minutes, Geller failed to astound.
The real trick here was not performed by Geller, but by Carson, who deftly played the role of generous host, making something that could easily have seemed cruel come off as kind. He confesses humbly to being a little skeptical, makes a big show of wanting Geller to do well, invites him to return and try again, and as Geller struggles, Carson listens, waits patiently, acts baffled. An amateur magician himself, Carson possessed a quick and cutting wit, but in keeping it restrained, he clarified his greatest gift.
Johnny Carson was a genius in the art of being liked, which is remarkable, considering he wasn’t, on paper, especially likable: A largely absent father, philandering husband, a sometimes mean drunk, a fiercely private figure even to many close to him. He was a talk-show host who didn’t always seem to enjoy talking to people.
At the pinnacle of his fame in the late 1970s, Carson said his best friend was possibly his lawyer, Henry Bushkin, who would later write that he was shocked by this admission, adding that he had never “met a man with less of an aptitude or interest in maintaining real relationships.”
Except the one with the vast American public. In our fragmented media landscape, it can be difficult to grasp just how large Carson loomed over the culture. At the center of late-night for 30 years — he presided from 1962 to 1992 — he is the most influential talk-show host of all time, and possibly the most popular figure in the history of television. Yet for someone so famous, it seemed as if we never really got to know him.
In the popular imagination, Carson has become the perfect avatar for a monoculture that no longer exists: calm and inoffensive, rigorously conventional and apolitical, the kind of soothing showbiz personality that helps everyone go to sleep. He reflected our country with his polite fake neutrality. But there’s always been more of a subtext and strategy to his performance, a crowd-pleasing fantasy beneath the facade that speaks to deeper and darker strains in the American psyche.
IT’S BEEN THREE DECADES since he retired, which means he’s been off the air longer than he was on. But he remains relevant this year. In the middle of denouncing late-night hosts at a rally, Donald J. Trump praised Carson’s greatness, begging him to return. Carson is a figure of power and intimidation in the new movie “Saturday Night,” which portrays him as concerned that “S.N.L.” might compete with his show for bookings. And the latest season of “Feud” featured Molly Ringwald as his second wife, Joanne, a good friend of Truman Capote, who once wrote a Carson-like character described as a rageful sadist behind “that huckleberry grin.”
Many have tried to explain Carson’s success. He was an even-keeled former game show host from the Midwest who specialized in light banter and easygoing punchlines. Standing with military posture, he never appeared to be working that hard and the biggest laughs in his monologue were often in the silent pauses after a joke bombed. How could someone so robotic and bland become a late-night giant?
Now the first major reported biography since his death has arrived to try to answer that question. Its author, Bill Zehme, is a heavyweight profiler, a wonderful stylist who has written some of the best journalism about the psychology of the peculiar characters who populate late-night television. With his profile of David Letterman, for instance, he did a better job of digging into that Carson protégé’s relationship with his father than anyone else. But the original host proves to be a more challenging subject.
“Carson the Magnificent” is a fascinating if frustrating read. It often seems at war with itself, perhaps because Zehme died before finishing it. His research assistant, Mike Thomas, who completed it, tells us in the introduction that Zehme set out to write a “celebratory biography,” and I believe him. But it doesn’t read that way. When Carson gave him his blessing for the book and said he didn’t care if people took shots at him, Zehme wonders who would do that. If we are to believe this, the author had his innocence shaken.
His argument for Carson’s greatness rests considerably on what he didn’t do, the jokes he didn’t make, the restraint. In one of his better zingers, Zehme writes that Carson “understood withholding better than a tax accountant.” He keeps returning to the words of a Carson producer, Art Stark, who said he was “great by omission.”
This is an essential point. Carson understood better than anyone what he did well and made sure to do nothing more. Unlike several of his peers, he avoided acting. The many parts he turned down included the Jerry Lewis character in “The King of Comedy” and the Gene Wilder one in “Blazing Saddles.” He rarely did interviews and remained scrupulously tight-lipped about his personal life. Carson didn’t leave the four corners of the television set.
But staying out of the picture isn’t enough to explain his singular appeal and dominance. When he took over “The Tonight Show” from Jack Paar in 1962, replacing that legendary star was considered a suicide mission. Within half a year, Carson had eclipsed him in the ratings. When he staged a wedding with the eccentric musician Tiny Tim, hardly a major draw, 45 million people watched the show, making it the highest-rated broadcast of the decade after the moon landing. In the 1970s, Carson’s audience ballooned, averaging 17 million a night in 1978 and bringing in an unprecedented $40 million to $50 million annually.
But numbers alone don’t begin to measure his singular influence. He was the most powerful gatekeeper in comedy, single-handedly making stars of David Letterman and Steven Wright, among others. When he moved the show to Los Angeles from New York in 1972, it’s not an exaggeration to say the balance of cultural power shifted from one coast to another.
Carson wielded his power conservatively, careful to reflect the culture more than challenge it. As Nora Ephron put it, he “never, ever made them think.” He was criticized for avoiding politics and controversy, with some unfavorably contrasting his work with the more daring shows of Dick Cavett. When asked about his competitor, Carson told The New Yorker: “The trouble with Dick is that he’s never decided what he wants to be — whether he’s going for the sophisticated, intellectual viewer or for the wider audience. He falls between two stools.”
Carson was laser-focused on the second stool. He arrived on the scene at exactly the moment television transitioned from a luxury device to an essential one. And he retired before the culture Balkanized, so his tenure took place when there were few options at 11:30 at night. But attributing his success only to impeccable timing gives him short shrift: He built an audience that was not there, and he did have competition, like turning off the television or talking to your spouse.
VIEWERS CHOSE CARSON because he gave them what they wanted, which was, to put it bluntly, a little bit of comedy and a little bit of sex. Let’s start with the first.
One of the striking things about Johnny Carson biographies is how little effort they spend on the actual comedy, let alone how radically it changed from its 90-minute (and longer) freewheeling version in the 1960s and ’70s to a more slickly showbiz style in later years. It’s like writing a book on Taylor Swift without analyzing the songs. Late-night talk show hosting is rarely treated as an art though it is in fact a tightly planned, highly artificial enterprise. But otherwise discerning people consider it simply a display of personality.
The most overlooked aspect of Carson’s appeal is that he was a comedy nerd. His characters, like Aunt Blabby and Floyd R. Turbo, look corny now, but they killed in their day. Though he was known for his comic timing, it’s wasn’t off-the-cuff. It was the result of a lifetime of study. In interviews, Carson would protest that he didn’t know anything about comedy and insisted that breaking down jokes only ruined them. But at the University of Nebraska, he wrote his senior thesis on the art of comedy writing. It’s a fascinatingly technical analysis of the work of many of the most successful performers from the radio comedies of his youth like Jack Benny and Fred Allen.
He breaks down structure, character and word choice, and concludes, among other points, that all comedy characters must be sympathetic. He explores ways to do this, including playing the fool and demonstrating common flaws. He notes that Bob Hope made himself a target for insults, thus allowing him to return to attack. “Once a comedian wins their sympathies,” he says of the audience, “he’ll win their confidence and they will go along with him on a gag.”
WHAT YOU SEE in Carson’s argument is a sensitivity to the importance of staying likable for a comedian. While this often meant caution, it did not always. In his early years, he was even a bit edgy, introducing a risqué sexual humor to the masses that is now pervasive. Later, when he let us into his personal life through jokes about his failed marriages, he did more than any celebrity to normalize discussion of divorce in America. But he was always the hapless victim of these jokes, which boiled down the dissolution of his marriages to a financial transaction: He made the money and his wives took it.
The Carson jokes that linger the longest in the culture involve innuendo. In his most famous gag, after the actor Ed Ames, promoting the TV series “Daniel Boone,” threw a tomahawk at an outline of a cowboy that landed right under the crotch, Carson quipped, “I didn’t know you were Jewish.”
Carson’s most influential tool was that caught-in-the-cookie-jar voice he would use when making a slightly dirty double-entendre. You still hear Jon Stewart break into it any time he makes a sex joke. It was bold to utter these kinds of lines on television back then, especially on daytime, where Carson hosted a morning quiz show. In one episode, a bodybuilder guest compared the body to a home. Carson retorted: “My home is pretty messy, but I have a girl come in once a week to clean it out.”
He got away with this because he looked so boyishly innocent and brought matinee-idol looks to talk shows. In his first years on late night, he smoked on a set with a shag carpet in an environment that evoked a tamer Playboy Club. Indeed, his guests skewed heavily toward men, and there was a locker room-vibe to his exchanges with Don Rickles or Frank Sinatra.
“The Tonight Show” presented its audiences with a showbiz fantasy in which the beautiful and famous dressed up and chit-chatted like old friends. But it also sold an old male fantasy in which women tended to fall into two rigid categories: sex objects or nurturing mothers.
Told that the actress Valerie Perrine had complained that he told too many jokes about women’s breasts, Carson blamed her low-cut dresses. For women with higher necklines, he asked about children. Lily Tomlin said Carson seemed surprised when she told him on-air that she didn’t want kids. “For a female to say you didn’t even want children,” she said, “it was like: What’s wrong with her?”
And while he helped the careers of Roseanne Barr, Ellen DeGeneres and Joan Rivers (until she had the temerity to start her own show, after which she was banished), Carson booked many more male comics.
In Rolling Stone, Carson suggested there was something inherently antithetical about a funny woman. “It’s much tougher for women,” he said. “You don’t see many of them around. And the ones that try, sometimes are a little aggressive for my taste. I’ll take it from a guy, but from women, sometimes, it just doesn’t fit too well.”
Coming from the most important gatekeeper in comedy, this statement did more to set back women in comedy than a million dumb comments about female comics not being funny.
This is the ugly side of Carson’s power, one that the new book doesn’t investigate or really grapple with. Zehme covers Carson’s treatment of women, then struggles to defend it in the most hackneyed ways possible, psychoanalyzing the host’s relationship with his emotionally withholding mother or trying that old standby: blaming the times.
But the book is unflinching in its reporting. When the first of his four wives, Jody, describing a circumscribed life in which she was “captive” to the star, asks him to take her to a party, Carson replies, “Why take a ham sandwich to a banquet?” His second wife, Joanne, recalled a more harrowing marriage, filled with eruptions that she would have to clean up. When he drank, she faced “a tremendous anger about women that would come out.”
This is a version of Carson that wasn’t apparent on television. But the late-night talk show is an intimate form, and over thousands of hours of hosting, you will reveal yourself.
Watch some of those jokes; he wasn’t hiding as much we thought. How much clearer could he be than when he joked: “Half the marriages end in divorce — and then there are the happy ones.”
That mean streak was evident in how he treated his sidekick, Ed McMahon, whose job, as he himself described it, was to laugh at his boss’s jokes and not be too funny. Carson regularly took shots at McMahon. In their dynamic, Carson wasn’t the one who drank a lot. The host cracked, “The first time Ed saw Niagara Falls, he asked, ‘Does that come with scotch?’”
YOU DIDN’T WATCH the show to identify with Ed. Carson played the benevolent patriarch, but for many male viewers, the pleasure was imagining that you were Johnny, poised and in command, surrounded by flirtatious women and yes-men. Actual show business in the 1960s and ’70s was filled with activists and counterculture fervor, but “The Tonight Show” provided a break from all that, a return to “Mad Men”-era glamour. It presented a certain macho, nostalgic vision. Our recent presidential election proves that can be a surprisingly potent pleasure.
Carson’s reputation for steering clear of politics has been overstated. Many politicians sat in the guest chair, and he made frequent jokes about them. (His first bit on “The Tonight Show” included a now obscure reference to Richard M. Nixon.) Performing as master of ceremonies at a televised inaugural gala for Ronald Reagan would in today’s hothouse media environment draw massive criticism and become a culture war football. What mattered to him was keeping things sunny. In 1967, Robert F. Kennedy had to threaten to cancel his appearance on the show in order to be allowed to talk about poverty in America.
On his show, Carson kept his audience unsure of where he stood, in part because he was smart enough to suspect that if he was more transparent, some might not find him so funny.
He knew what to hold back, but also how to show just enough to play into visceral pleasure centers. Carson derided “Saturday Night Live” in its early years for being cruel, making the “kind of joke you tell at a private party,” but its pointed perspective was just closer to the surface.
Look again at his exchange with Geller. In dragging out the appearance, Carson is making the magician sweat, turning his anxiety into our amusement. This is the humor of embarrassment, a powerful staple of reality TV, prank shows and roasts. Carson even uses his characteristic pauses, not to set up a joke, but to extend the torture.
Then comes the knockout blow. Geller, defeated and flailing, desperately tries to hold onto some dignity by suggesting his mind-over-matter tricks went over better than they did. When Geller made a casual reference to the “bent spoon” in front of him, Carson did not withhold. Quietly, offhandedly, he pushes back: “A spoon that’s got a slight bend in it.”
It’s a subtle correction, delivered just gently enough to look like nothing. But it hits with the savage force of Jack Nicholson swinging an ax in “The Shining.” Looking to enjoy some old-fashioned American humiliation? Here’s Johnny!
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