When I was a kid I had a two-disc LP comprised of the audio of ‘Tonight Show’ segments. The Johnny Carson album was a big flop for some reason–Carson liked to joke about it–and I can’t remember quite why we had it since neither I nor my parents watched Carson.
Let us bid this world-wearying week farewell with a superb performance from the great Steven Wright on The Tonight Show in 1982. Thanks to Wright’s Wikipedia entry, I learned a new word–albeit one I’m still not sure how to pronounce or even to use properly in a sentence. According to
I really was going to move onto another female comic this week. But this brilliant Joan Rivers appearance on Johnny Carson from 1979 was calling me from my YouTube offerings this morning and there was simply no way I was not going to share it. I’ve never seen Carson laugh
Here’s one of Albert Brooks’s best appearances on Johnny Carson. This is from 1983-ish (he apparently was about to shoot the thoroughly unnecessary remake of ‘Unfaithfully Yours’ with Dudley Moore which was released in 1984) and features one of his most Brooksian inventions–the ‘home impressions kit’. Carson laughs so much
Every move, every twitch, every eye-pop of Rodney Dangerfield’s is a brilliant piece of method acting. Add to that the non-stop jokes and you have one of the truly ‘performative’ comics; he’s a man named Jacob Cohen (his real name) who, under the pseudonym ‘Jack Roy’ (his first stage name)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3smUviG1G_s My friend Marc Myers of JazzWax sent me this terrific guest appearance by Jerry Lewis on ‘The Tonight Show’ from 1984. Unlike many of Jerry’s appearances which were often fraught with tension and humorous banter with Carson that had a curious edge of unease, this one is straight-up delightful.
In yesterdays post I discussed Buddy Rich’s musical analphabeta (i.e. he couldn’t read music). Today, thanks to some algorithm that I don’t really want to know about, the above video was waiting for me cheerfully in my Youtube queue. It’s a very funny five or so minutes from a 1974
To those of us who remember the Johnny Carson incarnation of ‘The Tonight Show’, the band (or the ‘NBC Orchestra’ as they were formally known) looms as an important piece of the magical synthesis of talents that produced the greatest talk show in TV history. (If you haven’t delved into