Johnny Carson - Wikipedia

Johnny Carson - Best night show ever!!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFQFf_Vb0Hw

The Tonight Show was never the same after he left the show Maj Marty Hogan !

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that October 23 is the anniversary of the birth of American television host, comedian, writer, and producer John William Carson who "is best known as the host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–1992)."

Rest in peace John William Carson.

1. Background from allmusic.com/artist/johnny-carson-mn [login to see]
"Johnny Carson was born on October 23, 1925, in Corning, IA. He was raised in Norfolk, NE, and attended the University of Nebraska. The actor/comedian was the host of NBC's Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992 and, though he inherited the hosting duties of the program from Jack Parr, defined the show and became the icon for late night television. For those 30 years, Johnny Carson was arguably the most popular entertainer in the country and America's most identifiable celebrity on television. Carson served in the Navy from 1943 to 1946 and moved to California in 1950, where he began working in television and radio. The first show he hosted was called Carson's Cellar and aired in 1951. He also wrote and performed on The Red Skelton Show in 1954. In 1956, Carson moved to New York City and he hosted the television game show Who Do You Trust? from 1958 to 1963. During that show's successful run as ABC's top daytime program, Carson was invited to appear on The Tonight Show. His first guest appearance was in 1958 and in 1962, Carson began a 30-year job as the show's frontman. Interestingly, he co-wrote the famous "Johnny's Theme" that opened each show with Paul Anka in 1962 and receives residuals from each daily performance to this day. The first guest of the Carson era was Groucho Marx, who introduced Carson to his new audience. Johnny Carson became known for his relaxed manner, witty commentary, and impersonations. His opening monologue became a national institution and Carson was trusted to such a degree that when he jokingly announced a shortage on toilet paper in 1973, it truly became "the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 1973." Reports of hoarding and buying extreme quantities were off-kilter proof of his societal impact. Critics sung the praises of his monologues, describing its import in glowing terms: "a magnifying glass on American culture," and "a national institution." Johnny Carson was the most valuable asset in television, making The Tonight Show NBC's biggest money maker and its most consistently high-rated program. Carson was the last person millions of Americans saw before going to sleep every night and The Tonight Show became a cultural tradition that spanned generations and races. Known for a combination of Midwestern charm and cosmopolitan wit, Carson created the standard for late night television, as well as some of TV's most enduring characters. A typical show would include Ed McMahon's introduction, "Heeere's Johnny!", a topical monologue, that famous golf swing followed by interviews with celebrities and common people, and of course, Doc Severinsen's music. Carson's most famous characters included the Mighty Carson Art Players, Art Fern, and Carnac the Magnificent, a psychic whose daft predictions poked fun at politicians and current events. The Tonight Show was also the most-prominent launching pad for comedy careers and Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jay Leno all appeared with Carson before becoming famous. When Carson threatened to quit The Tonight Show in 1979, NBC gave him a new contract, shortened the show from an hour and a half to just an hour, increased his salary, and gave him more vacation time as well as an ownership stake in the program. His reward was fair considering that by 1979, The Tonight Show had an audience of more than 17 million viewers and generated a mind-boggling 17 percent of NBC's profits. Carson Productions, founded in 1980, made him very wealthy as producer of other shows and current caretaker of The Tonight Show video empire. Considered one of the most influential television performers, Johnny Carson's legacy skyrocketed when, unexpectedly, he announced his retirement in 1991. The final guests on the next-to-last show on May 22 were Robin Williams and Bette Midler, who sang a tearful goodbye to the legend. The final show was a paired down night of archival clips and remembrances with McMahon and Severinsen. An estimated 50 million viewers watched his departure from the national spotlight. Carson was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1987. Along the way, he won no less than five Emmy awards, an American Comedy Lifetime Achievement Award, an American Guild of Variety Artists Entertainer of the Year Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1992), a Kennedy Center Honors Lifetime Achievement Award (1993), and the affection of millions. The Tonight Show also won a Peabody award, which is awarded annually to the best in broadcast media. Reflecting upon Carson's legacy, writer Kenneth Tynan noted that "the way he uses the camera as a silent conspirator is probably his most original contribution to TV technique." The final Tonight Show with Carson was treated like a major news event and received front-page coverage in most major newspapers. The Washington Post defended the attention, "after all, Carson was late night TV, and with decency and style he made America laugh and think." Since 1992, Carson has stayed out of the public eye. On March 19, 1999, Carson had quadruple bypass surgery in Santa Monica. His notable TV guest appearances include Night Court, Get Smart, Here's Lucy, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Newhart, Cheers, The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom, The Newton Boys, and The Simpsons. Once asked what he would like his epitaph to read, Carson responded, "I'll be right back."


2. Background from Author Bill Zehme from pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/biographical-essay-about-johnny-carson-by-author-bill-zehme/2054/
"Biographical Essay About Johnny Carson by Author Bill Zehme
May 7, 2012
By Bill Zehme, author of the forthcoming Carson the Magnificent: An Intimate Portrait (Simon & Schuster).
Here—or, more indelibly, heeeeeeere—is John William Carson who, on May 22, 1992, did for the very last time what nobody else has ever done better (or with greater panache and seismic authority), from behind or in front of any desk, performing invaluable national service nightly on a television screen. There, all cool and bright, he was a man named Johnny (never John, which he had always been—even in boyhood—and would remain to those who knew him best). Moreover, he was a man of unprecedented omnipotence for his line of work: It was October 1, 1962—just a few weeks before his thirty-seventh birthday—when Carson commenced his fabled epoch of hosting The Tonight Show, NBC’s venerable bedtime franchise. Across the next 29 years, 7 months, 3 weeks total, he rose to reign iconic as the smooth midnight sentinel king whose political japes and cultural enthusiasms mightily swayed popular taste at whim or wink. (The Carson wink, incidentally, would be the last best wink known to humankind; it transmitted, among other things, surefire stardom to aspiring personalities, especially comedians, and privileged co-conspiracy to regular viewers who became his spontaneous partners in sly mockery. He made high art, too, of the silent sidelong glance into whatever camera lens available—his eyes impishly saying everything he chose not to speak aloud, only saying it louder.)
Patriarchal broadcast lion Walter Cronkite, a.k.a. the Most Trusted Man in America (arguably a time-share mantle owned in equal part by Carson), once summed up the long-shadow legacy of the late-night stalwart as that of “a cool kid from Nebraska with a cockeyed smile who became the most durable performer in the whole history of television.” True, like sun and moon and oxygen, Johnny Carson was there always, steadfast and suavely reassuring; even when he took time off for restorative behavior, his presence loomed while guest-hosts tarried gamely at his formidable desk. That he was watched and collectively experienced by an impossibly vast constituency during hours most intimate and vulnerable only deepened his American meaning. (Gravitas personified: Halfway through his run he was drawing an average of 17.3 million faithful, whereas today’s comedy night-boys are lucky to lure more than five million captive, albeit in a wholly different cable-splayed universe.) “We are losing a continuum,” fretted critic Tom Shales twenty years ago, evincing the groundswell of abandonment angst burbling as Carson’s final Tonight Show broadcast approached. “For nearly thirty years, at a tender and delicate hour . . . he has cured innumerable cases of the blues, alleviated countless depressions, mercifully interrupted millions of arguments. . . . It’s natural to panic.”

Carson was, for certain, the bump in the night that delivered hope and perspective. His opening monologues (ever his pride and joy) navigated us through seven presidential administrations, rasping out the perfect pitch of populist incredulity, always with subtle precision; the Carson version of history, as it occurred daily, anchored mass sanity funniest in a world gone perpetually mad. Also, like no one else in a latter century lifetime, his was the last face flickering onto the brain before so many billions of slumbers, thus launching the dreams of generations. (Medical science, no less, immortalized him by naming in his honor a form of temporary one-eyed blindness caused by burrowing the other eye into a pillow while nodding off watching TV: Carsonogeneous Monocular Nyctalopia.) Indeed, the great director Billy Wilder once gratefully proclaimed him “the Valium and the Nembutal of a nation.” Only two weeks before the king’s abdication, Frank Rich put it this way in The New York Times: “The actual content of a Carson show did not matter. At a time of anxiety, who cares about the color and material of a security blanket?” The unassailable upshot: No other performer had ever felt so dependably essential to his country’s sense of well-being—or, quite likely, would ever wish to.
Famously the most public of private men and vice-versa (which was only part of his peculiar genius for longevity), he could joke, “I will not even talk to myself without an appointment.” While openly on display for three decades of nocturne, he was at the same time barely spotted anywhere outside of television screens—which was how he liked it, then and ever after. (His gift for hiding in plain sight didn’t diminish during the intractably cloaked thirteen-year retirement he spent relishing spotlight-free living; Garbo and Salinger had nothing on his powers of ordinary civilian invisibility.) Still, a silken aw-shucks Everyman exemplar—confident and dashing and eternally boyish—he was also slippery as the night is long, never easy to pin down, yet always an affirming presence to behold whenever he could be beheld: “And that’s why Carson has no equal—not even Cary Grant, whom he resembled in shyness, smartness, and lethal counter-punching style—as a model of what an American man might be,” wrote David Thomson, the fanciful British expatriate film scholar. “He came away from that scrutiny as both an American ideal and a mystery man; agreeable and withdrawn; good company and intensely alone; attractive yet cold . . . always there, never graspable. . . . I feel he stayed unknowable so as to be seductive, to stay there, on TV.” Carson, the staunch Midwestern pragmatist, would simply ascribe all that to good business sense: “Always leave them wanting more,” he would genially repeat to quell chronic speculation about his personal world—all evasive twinkle, all the time.

“Johnny packs a tight suitcase,” was the definitive Carsonian metaphor coined by Ed McMahon, his Gibraltar-like sidekick and irrepressible foil since 1958 when they joined disparate forces in New York on the hit afternoon ABC quiz-fizz Who Do You Trust? That glib daily showcase would four years later springboard them (how could he not take Ed?) to The Tonight Show, which beamed from NBC’s 30 Rockefeller Center, Studio 6B, during Carson’s first decade of enthronement preceding its permanent shift westward to California. (Meanwhile, McMahon’s nightly vowel-elasticizing host introduction—“Heeeeeeeeeere’s Johnny!”—would be consecrated in 2006 as the number-one ubiquitous television catchphrase ever, according to the TV Land cable network.) But the Carson personal world was knowable enough—and gingerly becomes only more so in his majestic if complex mortal wake. Devotees had long known, for instance, that he married four times and divorced thrice from a trio of wives with ridiculously similar first names: Joan Wolcott (his University of Nebraska college sweetheart who bore him three sons while absorbing all of his career birthing pains as well), Joanne Copeland (whose impassioned loyalty propelled his early stratospheric Tonight Show stewardship), and Joanna Ulrich Holland (who gracefully enhanced and broadened his relocated lifestyle of California kingliness). He took his final and considerably younger bride Alexis Mass in 1987, making theirs his longest turn at wedlock, inevitable bumps in the last years notwithstanding. “Marriage takes a lot of work,” he once said, certain of his limitations. “Some fellas have a proclivity for that, and some can make model airplanes . . . I do well with this show.”
Most viewers also knew that as a kid he learned magic (enter The Great Carsoni!), largely to overcome shyness, and never stopped creating illusions, especially when trapped at parties (he went nowhere without a deck of cards) or when making hypnotically irresistible television after dark. He entered existence on October 23, 1925, in Corning, Iowa, the middle child of Homer L. (“Kit”) Carson, a kindly power-company yeoman, and the former Ruth Hook, an exacting woman of refinement with thin patience for her future-famous son’s strivings. When John was eight, the family settled in Norfolk, Nebraska, where just under a handful of years hence he snagged a friend’s magic-manual and would, at age fourteen, as Carsoni, earn his first performance fee—three dollars—from the town Rotarians. Thus, as Time’s Richard Corliss saliently suggested, he’d “found within himself the secrets of conjuring—misdirection, poise, timing, a commanding personality—which are also the secrets of standup comedy.” All pieces more or less fell into place thereafter with haphazard surety. Starting in Omaha, where TV arrived the same time he did, at station WOW (true), he began a life of hosting that led him to gilded Los Angeles and local acclaim on KNXT, the CBS affiliate, with quirky novelty programs that eventually beguiled the network to shove him into his own national primetime Thursday night half-hour, The Johnny Carson Show (debut date June 30, 1955), an ongoing experiment in sketch-and-song confusion that crashed after 39 weeks. His promising glimmer resurfaced and shone at last some 18 months later in New York, helming the game show originally (if ironically enough) called Do You Trust Your Wife? before the titular Trust question was generalized ungrammatically.
“I turned The Tonight Show down the first time it was offered to me because Who Do You Trust? was very comfortable and quite easy,” he recalled sometime after he changed his mind, agreeing to replace the legendarily manic sensation Jack Paar who’d worn of the relentless grind not yet five years into his own jangly reign supreme. “My first reaction was, ‘Why do you need that kind of trouble?’ Then they came back [three weeks later], and I said, ‘If you’re really going to take a shot at it, if you really want to entertain, you ought to grab for all the marbles or get out of the business.’ The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that Tonight was the only network show where I could do the nutty, experimental, low-key thing I like best.”
Forty years after having first seized the night to do what he and his country liked best, and one decade after he had quit, I found myself the beneficiary of his lively company for a long red-wine-sipping lunch, as he submitted to the lone magazine profile (or media visitation of any sort) since the early onset of his retirement vanish. “I think I left at the right time,” he told me that January afternoon in 2002, which also turned out to be almost exactly three years to the day when emphysema took him forever (January 23, 2005). “You’ve got to know when to get the hell off the stage, and the timing was right for me.” (IT’S ALL IN THE TIMING, I knew, was his life’s credo as well as the hand-stitched mantra on a needlepoint throw pillow he treasured.) Unavoidably, among the grand tales and meandering topics that flew from him that day, he gently groused only a little about being asked constantly whether he missed the work whose standard he’d made unmatchable. With a shrug and a whiff of quiet satisfaction, he repeated the three-word response he gave whenever the question arose: “I did it.” Who could argue otherwise?"

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 25th Anniversary Specia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u7_R3JGkmw

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