Mind you, altho funny, that joke was by no means the funniest ever on Carson.
Some of that (much of that) may be leftover laughter from whatever the previous gag was. The Carnac bit was a bunch of one-liners like that, one after another. The cumulative affect of laughter helps a lot as well. When you’ve already been laughing, it’s easier to laugh at the next joke.
That interview is from March. The publisher Unbound went into bankruptcy, moved all its assets including the rights to make money from its authors’ books into a new business, and sent out a letter to its authors saying it had no legal obligation to pay them and therefore wouldn’t, in June.
Also in June, Joel Morris publicly stated that he would no longer promote the paperback of his book because he would get no money from it.
You can verify these things by putting some actual effort into your kind factchecking, or you could just trust me. But this is a ridiculous hijack and I will not be continuing it.
I am a gen-Xer, so I am not entirely positive, but I’m guessing that because Carson left The Tonight Show in 1992, and his audience skewed a bit to his own generation, there was some anti-college going on as well.
What I mean is, there was a time, from about the 1920s through the 50s, when jokes at the expense of college students or the college-educated, were popular. The Andrews Sisters even released a song poking fun at college students, and the song was older then their release.
I’m not sure at all of what was at the root of it-- probably a lot of perception of college students playing Peter Pan for four years (colleges acting in loco parentis didn’t help), while real people went to work or the military at 18, and the fact that college students used to have a lot more rituals promoting class-year bonding, that were fodder for jokes were at work.
So, given that “Sis-boom-bah” was associated with college cheerleaders, the audience was probably expecting a joke about college students, and to reiterate-- this audience had grown up with them-- and instead got a joke about a very banal and silly subject. Almost the opposite of a joke about college students.
Subverted expectations is an important facet of humor. So the joke works on two levels-- one, for the banality of the subject matter, and two, for the bad pun. It’s both simple and a bit sophisticated. If all you perceive is the bad pun, then it is a groaner. And the time and situation for the subverted expectation has passed, so the joke no longer works on that level, which is the “sophisticated” part of it.
That, and the number of college graduates per capita was considerably lower than today, so you could still make jokes singling them out as a distinctive subset of the population.
Johnny Carson was funnier watched late at night, after a few drinks or tokes or sleep deprivation.
I didn’t get it, either. And i think it’s because I’m not familiar with the phrase, “sis boom bah”, so i had no expectations to be flipped.
I also suspect that “it was unexpectedly gross” was part of the appeal, and that image isn’t as unexpectedly gross now, as @Sage_Rat pointed out.
But mostly, you need to have some prior expectations about “sis boom bah” for the joke to land.
Oh, but i loved the improv clip. That was hysterical.
It’s a good play on words. Would I get a laugh if I said it? Maybe a smile. Would another comedian? It was a Johnnie Carson joke.
One thing I wondered, watching these Carnac routines, were the punch lines written on all the envelopes, or maybe a paper on the desk? I can’t imagine memorizing a half dozen jokes and getting the correct order of the envelopes. Well, I guess memorizing is one thing, getting the envelope order correct is the hard part.
In one of hs books, James Randi explained the trick. Carson only had to memorize the first joke, every time he opened an envelope, the paper inside had the next one written on it. He said it’s an old trick in metalist acts.
my dad swore he saw it. He was not one to make this sort of stuff up especially since he had to explain it to his teenage daughter.
It was probably written by Kevin Mulholland, one of Carson’s writers.
IIRC, the previous joke bombed, prompting Johnny to respond with something like “May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits.”
I always thought sheep didn’t explode so much explode as…plummet.
My wife raised sheep for years. Trust Me, the idea of an exploding sheep is hilarious!
My introduction to “Sis-boom-bah”:
Something the GI bill and Vietnam changed; men went to college in droves, whatever way they could, to avoid Vietnam, and men who’d been there had the resources to go when they would not have otherwise.
Something like 60% of the student housing at my university was built between 1965 - 1975 (the baby boom accounts for some of that, too), with a couple of new builings since 2000, and when I was there in the 80s-1990, only a couple of dormitories from before WWII still used as student housing.
I remember seeing the “may the fleas…” comment and that is the only one I remember. Did he only do it more than once? Or, is this the most memorable?
I have vague recollections of several others, but at the moment can’t recall any of them. Although my brain is trying to nudge me about one which referred to “a diseased camel” and “your sister”.