Johnny Carson dead at age 79

[JSngry]

What did Miles say to Cage?

"Say man, play that famous thing of yours. You know, 4'33"."

[BERIGAN]

It's interesting seeing how many of us have similar tales....remembering what a treat it was to stay up late as a kid on a friday night, or during the summer and seeing the show(Perhaps your parents didn't know you had turned the tv back on)

So many comedians owed their career to him....He was the best at interviewing , Jay and Dave have gotten better through the years, but nowhere near his ability. Just a very likable guy, who made the difficult seem easy. Anyone catch those people who filled in after Kilborn left CBS??? Yikes!!!

I loved catching Buddy Rich on Carson, Carson didn't go on the air the day Rich died. Joe Williams was his favorite singer, I believe, he was on all the time....

[PHILLYQ]

I remember once seeing Rodney Dangerfield on the show, and all Carson did was feed Rodney one straight line after another. Carson did such a great job of helping Rodney do his shtick, and Rodney was GREAT.

Another time he had Mel Brooks(born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn) as his first guest, and Brooks ended up being the ONLY guest! The show ended with Brooks pouring seltzer into the hanky pocket on Carson's suit jacket- Carson was laughing uncontrollably(I was, too.)

[Dave James]

Other than the George Gobel "brown shoes" comment, one of my favorite moments occured when Johnny and Madeline Kahn were discussing phobias. After sharing several of their own with eachother, Ms. Kahn says, with a completely straight face, "what I'm really most afraid of is balls coming towards my face." You can only imagine what Carson did with that one.

Up over and out.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

I can't even think of a present day TV host who would leave that alone in the right way. Everyone would feel the obligation to jump in with a comeback - but if you leave a comment like that out there, with silence and the appropriate raised eyebrow, it now becomes far funnier.

Mike

[PHILLYQ]

Great point , Mike- that was part of what made Carson so special.

[Guest Chaney]

January 29, 2005

Quiet Times, but Lots of Laughs, in the Years After 'Tonight'

By NICK MADIGAN

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 28 - There were only a few places where Johnny Carson let his hair down. The poker table was one of them.

Mr. Carson's notorious off-screen reserve dissipated during the monthly poker games that the film producer Daniel Melnick held for years at his house in the Hollywood Hills. The regulars included a panoply of well-known names, like Steve Martin, Neil Simon, Chevy Chase, Carl Reiner and Barry Diller.

"In our game we all became adolescents," Mr. Melnick, who had known Mr. Carson since their early days in television in New York, said in an interview this week, after receiving news of the former "Tonight" show host's death on Sunday.

"There was a lot of kibitzing, a lot of laughing," Mr. Melnick said. "We were a little more raucous than we'd be under other conditions."

Still, Mr. Melnick said, he always had to warn Mr. Carson in advance if he planned to invite a new player to the game, usually to fill the chair of an absent regular. It was a long drive from Mr. Carson's home in Malibu, and he did not like surprises.

"John was not comfortable playing with someone he didn't know," Mr. Melnick said. "I'd have to brief him beforehand."

Mr. Melnick, a producer on two of Mr. Martin's movies, "Roxanne" (1987) and "L.A. Story" (1991), said the poker games were still being held, in Mr. Martin's house, and that Mr. Carson had played as recently as last month.

"He looked fine to me," Mr. Melnick said. "We knew about the emphysema, but he wasn't carrying oxygen. He looked tanned from spending all that time on the boat."

Johnny Carson's shyness, which he readily acknowledged, was one of the paradoxes of his character, and it became startlingly evident after his retirement from a 30-year run on NBC's "Tonight" show in 1992, when he disappeared from public view and refused virtually all requests for interviews and personal appearances. He focused on tennis, spent a lot of time on his yacht, immersed himself in books, and learned Russian and Swahili. And he played cards.

After his retirement, Mr. Carson also supervised the editing and marketing of the videotape and DVD compilations of his years on the "Tonight" show, working with his nephew, Jeff Sotzing, the president of Carson Entertainment.

"He and I put those together," Mr. Sotzing said. "We had to see which segments worked and which didn't work."

Mr. Carson continued to write after leaving the "Tonight" show. He occasionally sent jokes to David Letterman, host of CBS's "Late Show." Mr. Letterman used some of them in his monologues. Mr. Carson also wrote for The New Yorker after his retirement.

In November, Mr. Carson donated more than $5 million to the University of Nebraska, his alma mater, in Lincoln, and also made substantial donations to a number of institutions in Norfolk, Neb., the town in which he grew up. He gave more than $2 million to a cancer treatment center in the town, and $500,000 to the local library, among other gifts. A memorial to Mr. Carson is scheduled for Sunday afternoon at the Johnny Carson Theater at the high school in Norfolk.

After Mr. Carson retired from "Tonight," Ed McMahon, who sat next to him on the couch for three decades, saw considerably less of the host. "We'd meet for lunch maybe three or four times a year," he recalled. "But after a time I felt I was intruding. For the last year or so I only talked to him on the phone."

Ed Hookstratten, a Beverly Hills lawyer who represented Mr. Carson for 15 years, said his client "was very much a man of privacy."

"He would do the show, get in his car, go home, have dinner with his wife and relax," Mr. Hookstratten said. "He did not need people socially. He loved tennis, and he loved his yacht. After he retired, he moved his office onto his yacht, and he'd go there daily."

Mr. Carson spent a good deal of time traveling, often in the company of Bob Wright, the chairman and chief executive of NBC Universal, and Mr. Wright's wife, Suzanne. They went to Africa in 1994, England the following year and Scotland the year after that, among other places. They visited the San Juan Islands on Mr. Carson's yacht, the Serengeti.

Mr. Wright, who estimated that about 90 percent of his relationship with Mr. Carson was "outside the workplace," said the former "Tonight" host was "not reclusive at all."

David Steinberg, the Canadian comedian and director who was a frequent guest and guest host on "Tonight," said in an interview that most people who came into contact with Mr. Carson did not really know him.

"You do the show, but you don't necessarily hang out with him," Mr. Steinberg said. "He was socially comfortable only in his own small group - very at ease. But if we had lunch together, he'd be witty, well-read and always knew what was happening in the world."

More than anything, Mr. Carson "hated phoniness and he hated show-business phonies," said Mr. Steinberg, a director of the HBO show "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

Mr. Steinberg surmised that Mr. Carson would have been glad to avoid the commotion over his passing, especially the many laudatory television interviews this week with comedians who had appeared on "Tonight" as Mr. Carson's guests - people like David Brenner, Phyllis Diller and Don Rickles.

"He would probably say that his death was a boon to a lot of comedians who haven't been on TV for a while, including me," Mr. Steinberg said.

Mr. Steinberg said that, after retirement, Mr. Carson remained "very accessible to his friends" and that the two saw each other every so often for lunch or dinner.

Four or five years ago, when Mr. Steinberg was booked for a stand-up night at the Moonlight Tango Cafe in the San Fernando Valley, Mr. Carson called to make a reservation.

"When I heard he was coming it was as scary as could be for me," Mr. Steinberg recalled. "It electrified the room."

He said that in honor of Mr. Carson and his wife, Alexis, Mr. Steinberg built his routine around his stints on the "Tonight" show but did not force its former host to take a bow.

"Noooo!" Mr. Steinberg said, feigning horror. "He wouldn't have liked that."

Mr. Melnick, whose poker games became a hot ticket not only because of the heady company but because he had a fabulous cook, said Mr. Carson, a dexterous magician, was not an extraordinary player.

"He wasn't cheating - he lost as much as he won," Mr. Melnick said. "But he was really good with his hands. He'd run a quarter through his knuckles to stay limber. I think he and Steve Martin became magicians because it was probably a way, in adolescence, to deal with shyness."

Mr. Simon, the playwright and screenwriter, remembered the poker games as a friendly, low-stakes affair, full of banter.

"No one came to make a lot of money," he said. "And Johnny was quiet at the table. When he said something, it was funny. He didn't come to make jokes; he came to listen to jokes. When Johnny laughed, I really had a charge.

"I was the worst player," Mr. Simon said, laughing, "and he was the second worst."

Despite Mr. Carson's comedic gifts, Mr. Simon said, "he wasn't like so many comics, who want to push their comedy at you - they're in your nose, and you want them to back off. Not him."

After Mr. Carson's retirement, he occasionally invited Mr. Simon to the Malibu house to play tennis.

"I saw him socially a little, but he didn't go out much," Mr. Simon said. "It amazed me that he was able to pull away and stay away from it all after he left. I was amazed to see that he would stay at home and write jokes for David Letterman."

[BFrank]

Monday on Letterman:

- Senior Vice President of Worldwide Pants and Former Executive Producer of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, Peter Lassally

- Former Bandleader of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, Doc Severinsen

**Update**

NY Times

Letterman on Carson

David Letterman has lined up several "Tonight" show alumni for his first new show since the death of Johnny Carson. CBS said yesterday that Mr. Letterman's guests on the "Late Show" on Monday at 11:30 p.m. Eastern time would include Doc Severinson, leader of the Tonight Show Band; Peter Lassally, Mr. Carson's executive producer and close friend; Ed Shaughnessy, who played drums on "Tonight"; and Tommy Newsom, who played saxophone and was often a target of Mr. Carson's on-camera ribbing. — JACQUES STEINBERG

Edited January 29, 2005 by BFrank

[Dan Gould]

Letterman did a nice tribute to Carson by using only the jokes he had sent to Dave for his monologue. He only told the audience who had written the jokes after the monologue was over:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/01/t...n.ap/index.html

Highlights:

Letterman set up one joke by noting scientists had been working on an airplane that flew 50 miles above the Earth. Only two man-made objects were visible at that distance, he said.

"One is the Great Wall of China," Letterman said. "and the other is Donald Trump's hair."

Letterman said Hilton's dog, Tinker Bell, was missing for a few days because it was "with the Taco Bell chihuahua making a sex video."

Another joke noted Democrat John Kerry, under fire for his Vietnam service record, was criticized for throwing away some of his military service medals.

"Not to be outdone, President Bush threw away his National Guard spotty attendance records," he said.

I can hear Johnny's voice delivering them ...

Maybe somewhere else there's a complete transcript?

[BFrank]

Since most of those jokes seemed dated, I was thinking at the time that they might be Johnny's jokes.

... and they were.

Not exactly a transcript, but a synopsis, anyway.

The Wahoo Gazette

[Rooster_Ties]

Haven't checked this thread head to toe, but I seem to remember we only had a link to the audio of this classic.

Here's both the audio and video too...

link: Johnny Carson Copper Clapper Caper

Pure comedy gold.

Edited October 15, 2005 by Rooster_Ties