Johnny leaves the building
When Jack Parr quit the Tonight Show, after five years, he said that he felt as though he had said everything he had to say twice. By that standard Johnny Carson said everything he had to say twelve times.
Imagine what it takes to hold onto a piece of television real estate for thirty years. You've got to have something that no one else has more of and it has got to be something that an awful lot of people want. What Carson had was an on-air personality that never grated, was neither heavy nor too light, and which invariably drew laughter out of people who needed to wrap up the long American day with a sparkling nightcap.
He had his sidekick Ed McMahon there with him, but Johnny pulled the sled. The best nights for me were those when Buddy Hackett was on the show. The two of them, Carson and Hackett, knew how to juice each other perfectly, to a point beyond hilarity, into some state of rollicking amusement that might be matched now and then by others, but never surpassed.
One of Johnny's neatest tricks was that every time a joke bombed during his monologue, he made a joke out of the dead joke, and got the laugh anyway.
Here's to Johnny being in heaven a half hour before the devil knew he was dead.
Imagine what it takes to hold onto a piece of television real estate for thirty years. You've got to have something that no one else has more of and it has got to be something that an awful lot of people want. What Carson had was an on-air personality that never grated, was neither heavy nor too light, and which invariably drew laughter out of people who needed to wrap up the long American day with a sparkling nightcap.
He had his sidekick Ed McMahon there with him, but Johnny pulled the sled. The best nights for me were those when Buddy Hackett was on the show. The two of them, Carson and Hackett, knew how to juice each other perfectly, to a point beyond hilarity, into some state of rollicking amusement that might be matched now and then by others, but never surpassed.
One of Johnny's neatest tricks was that every time a joke bombed during his monologue, he made a joke out of the dead joke, and got the laugh anyway.
Here's to Johnny being in heaven a half hour before the devil knew he was dead.
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