![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I honestly don't understand why Johnny Carson got the reputation he ended up with.
There's a local TV station here that plays The Tonight Show reruns every night, after back-to-back double features of classic shows all day. I often leave it playing in the background while I'm crafting because I like those old shows.
Then Johnny comes on. He starts out the show with a standup comedy bit before he moves onto the interviews. Almost every night, he bombs. He has a few good jokes in there, but he also has a lot of dead air, where he goes "wow, OK" because nobody laughs and he realizes that he lost the room.
So, it's not that I don't get his humor a generation later. It's that I'm watching him make jokes that his own audience isn't laughing at. He's also a terrible interviewer. OK, he gets a lot of famous people on his show, and he also gets some really quirky non-famous people on his show. But the interviews *aren't actually any good*. They're filled with dead air, dead-ended questions, and lackluster performances.
Occasionally he gets a guest who gives a good interview in spite of Carson's lack of interviewing skill, because that guest is just that charismatic, but then that guest totally dominates the interview, steam-rolling over Carson and stealing the stage.
As far as I can tell, the only parts of his show that his audience seems to enjoy are the comedy skits that he throws in, and those are also hit-or-miss with his audience. Sometimes he gets non-stop laughter, sometimes he gets no reaction. But he gets bigger laughs with these bits than with any other part of the show (except for when his band leader takes a pot-shot at him).
And yet, he went down in history as the King of Late Night and all other late night shows have laboured to live up to Carson.
Frankly, I think pretty much every show afterwards was better. And not by my personal tastes, I'm going by the audience's laughter and the control of the interview.
Unless this TV station just happens to have chosen a collection of episodes with a high percentage of bad episodes and I just happen to tune in on those nights with all the bad episodes and I miss all the good ones. But somehow I think that's a really low probability coincidence.
There's a local TV station here that plays The Tonight Show reruns every night, after back-to-back double features of classic shows all day. I often leave it playing in the background while I'm crafting because I like those old shows.
Then Johnny comes on. He starts out the show with a standup comedy bit before he moves onto the interviews. Almost every night, he bombs. He has a few good jokes in there, but he also has a lot of dead air, where he goes "wow, OK" because nobody laughs and he realizes that he lost the room.
So, it's not that I don't get his humor a generation later. It's that I'm watching him make jokes that his own audience isn't laughing at. He's also a terrible interviewer. OK, he gets a lot of famous people on his show, and he also gets some really quirky non-famous people on his show. But the interviews *aren't actually any good*. They're filled with dead air, dead-ended questions, and lackluster performances.
Occasionally he gets a guest who gives a good interview in spite of Carson's lack of interviewing skill, because that guest is just that charismatic, but then that guest totally dominates the interview, steam-rolling over Carson and stealing the stage.
As far as I can tell, the only parts of his show that his audience seems to enjoy are the comedy skits that he throws in, and those are also hit-or-miss with his audience. Sometimes he gets non-stop laughter, sometimes he gets no reaction. But he gets bigger laughs with these bits than with any other part of the show (except for when his band leader takes a pot-shot at him).
And yet, he went down in history as the King of Late Night and all other late night shows have laboured to live up to Carson.
Frankly, I think pretty much every show afterwards was better. And not by my personal tastes, I'm going by the audience's laughter and the control of the interview.
Unless this TV station just happens to have chosen a collection of episodes with a high percentage of bad episodes and I just happen to tune in on those nights with all the bad episodes and I miss all the good ones. But somehow I think that's a really low probability coincidence.
