A Very Heartfelt Good-Night

24 January 2005



Johnny Carson 1925-2005

He hadn't done his TV show for 12 years. In show business, that is a life-time. Indeed, today's college freshmen probably don't remember Johnny Carson. But all the stand-up comedians they watch, and all the talk shows they view owe a huge debt to him and his 30 years' hosting “The Tonight Show.”

The tributes to Mr. Carson are almost uniform in tone. He was a polite, generous, funny, etc., and there is no reason to doubt that. He was also very reserved; according to some, he was a cold fish. Even Ed McMahon, his sidekick all those years, said, “Carson packs a tight suitcase,” meaning he held a lot of his feelings inside himself. Mr. Carson even confessed to being shy – an odd thing for an entertainer to say, but many in the game will admit they got started putting on roles as a way of being socially comfortable.

Another way to put it – Johnny Carson grew up on the Great Plains. Born in Iowa, raised in Norfolk, Nebraska, he was from smack dab in the middle of the country. Historically, it isn't the kind of place people give hugs and air-kisses (as New Yorkers or Californians do). It is, instead, a place where the word “nice” is a way of life as well as a mere adjective. Anyone lucky enough to have a drop or two of Plains blood always takes with him a part of whatever small town he called home – and most of those towns are indistinguishable. The idea of the “Ugly American” came from elsewhere.

A reporter once heard that he was learning a language because he wanted to vacation in a certain foreign land. He asked Mr. Carson point blank if it were true. The talk-show host said, “Well, it's their country. It's only polite to learn their language.” Perhaps, Americans will learn to elect Nebraskans to the White House some day. “Nebraska Nice” is what diplomats pretend to be.

Steve Allen started “The Tonight Show,” but Johnny Carson turned it into a national icon. Ed Ames throwing the hatchet, Karnak the Magnificent, anything with the animals at the San Diego Zoo, and the bird call contest all live in TV history. Regrettably, his first years' tapes were erased (the networks did a lot of that way back when) and his interviews with Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are lost. In a way, though, that is appropriate to Mr. Carson's memory. The only regrets are those things that can't be brought back rather than things that never were.

© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.

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