January 24, 2005
Heeeeeere's Johnny! Television Talk Show Legend Kicks It! Carson, RIP
David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno--especially Jay Leno--Craig Kilborn and even Jimmy Kimmel make their living entertaining the late-night television masses with a comic talk-show format perfected and cemented in practice by Johnny Carson, the host of the Tonight Show for thirty years. Carson died Sunday at age 79.
Without doubt, Carson was a major American television icon. The simple reason for his legendary status is that the TV personality was for so many years thoroughly embedded in the nightly ritual of so many Americans.
It was his comic presence that helped wrap the political and cultural events of the day in a humorous ten-minute opening monologue filled with one-liners that, given Carson's manner, were as often funny when they flopped as when they hit their mark.
People laughed at Carson's jokes and found pleasure in his celeb-filled hour of talk and variety. His flat, nasally Nebraskan tone was, for some, the last thing they heard each night as they sank into slumber in front of the blue glow of the TV set.
Though never myself a special fan of Carson or The Tonight Show (not then and not now), Johnny's passing brings back a few vivid memories.
Carson's program was very much an LA show writ for America. (For a few early years, the show was produced in New York.) That is, though it was a national program, it was subtly infused with an LA kind of casual, movie-town sophistication. Growing up in LA (and within the entertainment industry), the Tonight Show instinctively felt like it was homegrown. It even looked like a product of the city, especially during the years when the Tonight Show set had a backdrop of LA's lit-up night time skyline and was lined with the kind of verdant palms Angelenos take for granted year around, but that most of the rest of America associates with SoCal's mild Mediterranean climate.
Carson's death also reminds me of a childhood summer when I sneaked (or is it "snuck") into a screening of the Stanley Kubrick film "The Shining" at the local mall multiplex. I was with a gang of neighborhood kids and their cooler, older siblings. These older kids led us to abandon the forgettable G-rated Disney matinee our moms had sent us to and instead to surreptitiously slink into an R-rated horror flick.
"The Shining" was a terrifying film for child, but the most memorable line from the movie was Jack Nicholson's utterance of Carson's signature Tonight Show intro ("Heeeeeeeeeeere's Johnny!") as he psychotically chopped his way through a door with an axe in an attempt to murder Shelley Duvall.
That personal cinematic experience gave me a singular sensation--the simultaneous feeling of being scared shitless and tickled to laughter. Humor in the eyes of terror.
Finally, Carson also oddly reminded me of my dad. Though Johnny was much older and of a different generation, my dad watched him nightly. His humor was that of my parents' generation and sometimes, when my father would crack a joke at the dinner table, he unconsciously bore, for a moment, the manner of the talk-show star, as if Johnny's delivery was dad's template for cracking a successful joke.
Carson was so big that he was a pop-cultural reference point beyond his own talent, his own context, which is a sure sign of mass-cultural transcendence. Read more on Carson in the massive New York Times obit-article (see link below) in Monday's edition.
Johnny Carson, Rest in Peace.
RELATED LINKS
Johnny Carson, Low-Key King of Late-Night TV, Dies at 79 [NY Times]
Posted by Robsam at January 24, 2005 09:59 PM
