by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the American
Masters PBS special on Johnny
Carson, who turned out to be a bundle of contradictions: a farm boy from
Nebraska who projected an air halfway between jes’-folks common sense and
sophisticated urbanity, a man who portrayed a public persona that loved people and got along with them easily,
then turned that off as soon as the cameras stopped transmitting and the studio
lights were turned off and retreated into his shell (“I’m not lonely, I’m just
a loner,” Carson said, in one of his few personal remarks about himself and his
personality). I rarely watched The Tonight Show in Carson’s heyday because I’ve always been mostly
a day person and generally didn’t want to stay up that late, but even if I
didn’t watch him that much I still couldn’t escape being exposed to him, if not
on his own show then certainly as his lines got repeated by friends, co-workers
and through the cultural grapevine in the pre-Internet age. Indeed, one of the
great Carson stories this show, directed by Peter Jones, should have told and did not was how he single-handedly
started a shortage of toilet paper in the U.S. It was late 1973 and one of the
big news items of the time was the energy shortage — and Carson was riffing
during his monologue about all the other shortages that were threatening, then
joked, “And get this now: there’s a shortage of toilet paper in the United States! Toilet paper!” Actually, there wasn’t one when he said it, but
one soon got created because millions of Carson viewers and millions of others
who heard it from Carson viewers ran out to their local supermarkets and
stocked up on toilet paper until there really was a shortage.
The American Masters show was an interesting glimpse of a personality
who was a major part of American celebrity for 30 years, who ran one of the
most important gateways for new talent — for stand-up comedians in particular,
playing the Tonight Show was what
playing the Palace Theatre had been for their forebears two and three
generations earlier; indeed, the career of virtually every comedian who ever
went on the Tonight Show in
Carson’s three-decade run as host can be divided into two periods, B.C. and
A.C. (Before Carson and After Carson). For me, among the most interesting clips
on this show were devoted to Carson’s TV work before Tonight, including a CBS series called Carson’s Corner that looked like the kind of tacky local show
Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar were making fun of then and a game show called Who Do You Trust? that was a synthetic attempt to do a knock-off of You
Bet Your Life with a considerably less
suitable host than Groucho Marx — it’s nice to know that he actually had a background in the medium and wasn’t (as it
seemed back in 1962!) someone NBC dragged off a Nebraska farm and suddenly
plunged into Jack Paar’s (and Steve Allen’s before him) anchor chair at Tonight!
