I mean, what are you going to talk with them about for ten minutes? “How much does it suck to be the least lordly of the flies?”
On the other hand, you could see the pure joy on his face whenever he got to interact with Teri Garr or Amy Sedaris, and loved reminiscing with Michael Keaton about their early jobs together. He would positively swoon whenever he got Natalie Merchant or Emmylou Harris as a musical guest, and had great back and forth with Tom Waits. So, he didn’t hate everyone; just people who suck at being guests.
Late to the party, but I remember watching the original show that had the “Sis Boom Bah” line. I was a kid (I used to love staying up to watch Johnny Carson - made me feel very “grown up”) and I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I’d never seen a joke that just completely destroyed the audience and the comedians like that, and I laughed myself silly over it. Never once did I even consider anything about cruelty to some hypothetical sheep. It was just funny as hell.
The only other joke I’ve ever seen that affected everyone involved the same way was Richard Simmons on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” If you’ve seen it, you know the one I mean. I laughed my ass off at that one, too.
I laughed hysterically at the exploding sheep joke when I first saw the clip a few years ago and still think it’s funny. It wasn’t as if the only people laughing at the joke were Ed, Johnny, and me, either: the audience laughed, applauded, and cheered for almost 30 seconds.
“What happens when you yell ‘Aussie! Oy!’ and the Grand Canyon?”
It’s pretty irrelevant where these nonsense cheers get started. It just matters that people recognize them, and then you twist them into a weird, literal context.
And details matter. In the original clip, Johnny says “describe the sound made when a sheep explodes” and it kills. In the other clip of Ed recounting the story, he gives it as “what is the sound made by an exploding sheep?”, and nothing. Saving that absurd image until the last word helps make it funny. And Johnny managed to surpress his giggles long enough to get the line out. If he’d laughed and had to start over, the timing would have been all wrong.
I can’t explain why this joke is funny. All I can say is that as soon as I read “the funniest joke ever told by Johnny Carson” I immediately thought of sis-boom-bah before I opened the thread.
I guess I’m of the Carson generation and I thought the joke was quite funny. Maybe not the funniest Carson moment, that might be the Fugawee Indians bit. And not the only time “Baaaa” was the punch line. In one of Mel Brooks films a just married shepard and his wife go into their tent. From the outside we hear them trying to figure out how do “do it”. The wife says, “Just do as the sheep in the fields do”. After a perfectly long pause comes, “Baaaaa”.
Right. The joke, like many jokes (including pretty much all jokes from the Carnac routines) works by making the audience assume and imagine that it means one thing before abruptly changing the frame of reference so that it means something completely different. But if the setup (in this case, the phrase “sis boom bah”) doesn’t already mean something to you, you don’t have the kind of expectations that can be subverted to make the joke work.
The sheep joke is hilarious, both because it’s absurd and dumb and Johnny damned well knows how stupid it is, and because sheep are inherently funny.
I agree that a lot of the humor here is in the delivery. It’s funny that a grown ass professional comedian came up with this joke in the first place, put on a silly hat and actually told the joke knowing how ridiculous the whole thing is, and for a perfect moment in time, it was accepted and appreciated. There’s something transcendentally beautiful about a receptive audience and an earnest comedian.
You mean a gross ass professional comedian’s writers’ room came up with a bunch of options and he choose this as one of several to make it on air. Credit where credit’s due.
Was he gross? Did Carson get cancelled and I missed it?
I was too young to watch this show. I did watch The Carol Burnett Show in syndication, mostly at the behest of my mother, but she was right. That shit was funny.
If you watch the clip on YouTube, everyone was cracking up before Johnny even read the joke. And it was a bit of a dark joke, which wasnt common on the Carson show.
