Excerpt from another of his favorite songs:
(lyrics by Irving Kahal)
Goodnight, Johnny.
Rarely does a celebrity death make me stop and cry, but as an insomniac since high school, Johnny Carson was like, well, really he was like a friend. Everyone else in my family has always lived by “early to bed, early to rise” so many nights it was just me and Johnny in the den.
Another great example of why everyone needs to stop smoking now. Please.
RIP, friend. And thanks.
I just got a message from my mom about this. They are the same age, and she was always a huge fan of his. I still miss his show–Jay and Dave just aren’t the same.
A very funny man. I always thought he would do something else after the Tonight Show.
Another of his cool interests was drumming.
Starring Jack Lemmon, Jack Haley, Hayley Mills, the Mills Brothers, Dr. Joyce Brothers, and Spawn the Wondercarp in Dracula Gets Bombed on a Wino
Take the Ventura Freeway to another freeway until you get to the Slauson cutoff. Stop the car. Get out of your car. Cut off your Slauson. Get back in your car and travel until you come to …the fork in the road
It was so cold… How cold was it?
This article supports that. Not a nice way to go, from what I’ve heard. A sad, sad day…
This is a guy who really deserves his own accolades. Nobody will ever own the talk show format the way that Carson owned it. he was the gold standard. Everyone else is aluminum foil.
Darn. So now he’s doing The Late Show?
It’s a sad day, indeed. He was a comic genius.
Godspeed, Johnny.
I’m bummed.
He will be missed, if only in our hearts.
Who else would have handed Ed Ames a tomahawk?
I loved Johnny’s spontaneous quip after that one: “Frontier Bris!”
Oh, man. That stinks.
My favorite thing was when one of the jokes in his monologue would fall flat, and he’d give the audience that look–you know, he’d kind of pull his head back and press his lips together…it was a cross between saying “who me?” and scolding the audience for not laughing. It was hilarious every time.
And let’s not forget the greatest comic ad-lib of all time: “I didn’t even know he was Jewish.”
Fuck.
And to think he’d just started a new career of writing jokes for Letterman.
We’ll miss ya Johnny.
Jay Leno had better say something nice.
– from “One for my Baby,” as adapted by Bette Midler and sung to Johnny Carson on the last “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson”
And David Letterman.
I’m sure they will be appropriate and moved. After all, Johnny blazed the way for them.
I think Letterman was a lot closer to Johnny. And it’s telling that Carson was sending his jokes to Letterman instead of his ‘heir’ Leno.
But I wonder if Letterman will even be able to show clips or anything, given that all that stuff is NBC’s property.
Darnit Polycarp-I remember that show. He was the king of late night TV for my generation.
I have no doubt Letterman will do something nice.
On a show last week he had told a joke and said, “No, that wasn’t one of Johnny’s.”
AFAIK, the only post Tonight Show appearance Johnny ever made was on The Late Show. Johnny came out and told Dave how uncomfortable he was sitting on the other side of the desk. So, he brought a portable desk and unfolded it next to Dave’s.
One of Johnny’s biggest assets was the ability to get more mileage out of a bad joke than most comedians could get out of a good one.
Letterman has this quality if in a lesser degree.
Jay does not have this.
By the way, there’s also a thread in Cafe Society here that was started by Eve.
Sad news indeed. Besides the humor, the one thing that I’ve particularly missed since Johnny Carson has retired was his skeptical attitude towards sham artists such as Uri Geller. Those guys couldn’t get away with their crap on his show.