Watching Johnny Carson on Amazon Prime, I think its the 9th episode. During his monolog he jokes about the democratic candidates and makes a joke about (deleted) being the frontrunner.
The name is deleted. Is there any idea or clue as to who he said or why it was deleted?
BTW, the joke fell flat, so the audience wasn’t impressed
My first guess is Gary Hart because of his extramarital affair with Donna Rice. He was the front runner at the time, I believe.
What was the joke?
I’m guessing the deleted person wasn’t an actual candidate.
he joked about perennial candidate Harold Stassen but can’t see why that name would be deleted. He ran for president from 1948 to 1992.
Here’s a super-WAG: The big story that week was the eccentricities of man-child Michael Jackson. In light of more concrete evidence of child molestation, the compilers of the Carson collections thought that in hindsight the joke would be in very bad taste and something Johnny would not have used if he knew what we know now.
Jay Leno was called to testify in the Jackson molesting trial so he was not allowed to joke about Jackson before the trial. What he did was bring in a different comic each night to tell a MJ joke. BTW the reason he was called to testify was he had talked to the victim on the phone but not about MJ
Decades ago when The Smothers Brothers was on the air and Tiny Tim was a big thing, Tommy Smothers and Tim were both guests on the JC show and already on the couch. Carson introduced an up and coming male/female comedy duo and they put on a five minute sketch.
Some pop-psy book had come out about negotiating your way through a relationship and the precis was they’d both read the book and were on their first date. The two kept deferring to the other (I dunno; where would you like to eat) and there was some mild laughs as it went. Then, when they’re shaking hands at the end of the evening – bam! – the screen goes black and the sound is cut for a good five seconds.
When it is restored, the two bow and leave the stage, the audience is roaring, Carson is sitting with a stunned look on his face, Tiny Tim is blinking rapidly, and Smothers also has a surprised look on his face a moment before he breaks out in a huge grin. “Boy! They wouldn’t let us get away with that on our show!”
Whatever they did came out of left field and I have wondered from time to time just what it was.
I’ll see if my access to the Johnny Carson archives still works to view this episode and report back.
Johnny Carson is on Amazon Prime? I did not know that.
I went looking for the episode in question. It’s “Season 1,” episode 10, at about 3:20.
I have no idea who the bleeped name was, but Gary Hart was already mentioned earlier in the monologue. Was there a popular Democratic politician who had recently died?
What was the joke?!?
After talking about how many Democratic candidates there are:
“To give you an idea of how much trouble the Democrats are in, the experts say that ***** is ahead. And he’s unelectable.”
Guess who was the focus of a scandal at the time?
I wonder if Jack Kennedy was a friend of his too.
Got to be God or Jesus.
Court TV aired reenactments of the Michael Jackson trial and had Jimmy Kimmel, in makeup and with a prosthetic chin, playing Leno.
Evidently not. I haven’t used it in 4½ years and it’s not responding to my password reset request.
Wonder if it was Elaine May and Mike Nichols.
I heard this story many years ago. I don’t remember exactly what was said, other than it was something along the lines of:
“So, you wanna fuck?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I also seem to recall the players were from the Ace Trucking Company, probably Patti Deutsch and Fred Willard.
Jesse Jackson? Perhaps it’s censored because of an implied “because he’s black”?
Or maybe because he refers to New York as “Hymietown”? 
Thinking about that Ace Trucking Company sketch, I realized it reminds me a lot of this one. Maybe one influenced the other?
