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Carson was really
a daytime kinda guy
He learned his craft hosting 'Who Do You Trust?'
By Ed Robertson
We think of Johnny Carson as the man who invented
late-night talk. In many ways he was. But ironically, Carson was really
the product of daytime television.
More significantly, though, Carson was the first major TV
star who was really a creation of television.
You see, looking back to old Carson clips, a markedly different
style -- loose, laid back, cool. Carson understood well before others that
television was a cool medium. All of Carson's predecessors, all the lions of
early TV, had their roots in radio and in vaudeville. They tended to be hot,
loud, fast-taking--Milton Berle, Red Skelton, Jack Paar, Phil Silvers.
Another person of that era who understood the coolness of
television as a medium was John F. Kennedy, whose wit and ease led him to
trounce Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential debates.
The coolness of both Kennedy and Carson came from an
understanding that TV picked up, as radio did not, the most subtle nuances
of movement and gesture. Television waited for the joke to land.
Carson certainly had his roots on the stage and in radio. He
performed as a magician while a teenager, then hosted shows on two
Nebraska radio stations in the late 1940s before moving to Los Angeles in
1950. Back then everyone got their start on radio, but Carson's stay was
extremely brief.
Almost immediately he was on television as a staff announcer on
Los Angeles CBS affiliate station KNXT-TV. Not long after he landed his
own show, a local Sunday afternoon sketch comedy called “Carson’s
Cellar.”
“Carson’s Cellar” brought Carson to the attention of
Red Skelton, whose Sunday night “Red Skelton Hour” was one of the top
variety shows on CBS. In 1951, Skelton hired the young comic as a staff
writer. When Skelton injured himself during a rehearsal one Sunday, just
two hours before airtime, he called on Carson to stand in for him as host
of that night’s show.
Back in the ‘50s, network variety shows were broadcast live. To
succeed as a host, one had to be quick, clever and an adept ad-libber for
those unplanned moments when an act fell through or the show was disrupted
by a juggler's errant hoop landing in the studio audience.
Carson that
night acquitted himself admirably. His sharp wit, boyish good looks,
self-effacing humor and impeccable comic timing won over an audience
that had been expecting to see Skelton. The networks, already impressed,
began looking for the right venue for this rising talent.
Initially, it looked as though it would be in primetime. CBS gave
Carson two shots at primetime: the quiz show “Earn Your Vacation”
(1954), followed by the half-hour variety series “The Johnny Carson Show”
(1955-1956). Neither show lasted a full season; the latter went through
eight different directors and several changes to the writing staff in its
39 weeks on the air.
CBS then gave Carson a daily afternoon variety series, also
called “The Johnny Carson Show” (1956). Though that show would only
last 18 weeks, Carson found daytime TV more suitable for his impish,
off-the-cuff comic style. He was in his medium in the way he was not in
primetime. Daytime television back then was worlds apart from primetime,
looser, more relaxed, folksier.
“In daytime you can be relaxed and informal,” he once
said in an interview. “An easy informal show [won’t work in primetime]
because people aren’t conditioned to it.”
Carson's break came in 1957 when he took over as host of “Who Do
You Trust?” on ABC, based in New York. The show’s largely unscripted
format meshed perfectly with his coolness, and the show became a daytime hit.
“Who Do You Trust?” was a variation of Groucho Marx's long-running “You
Bet Your Life.” "Trust" had begun in primetime as
“Do You Trust Your Wife?” (CBS, 1956-1957). Originally hosted by
ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer
Snerd, the show featured married couples with unusual backgrounds whom
Bergen interviewed on the air before playing the game. As was the case
with “You Bet Your Life,” the quiz show part of “Trust” was
secondary to the often unpredictable banter between Bergen and the
contestants.
Carson proved a gifted ad-libber, a quipster on the same level as
Berle, Bob Hope and Marx, and that skill served him well during
his five years as the host of “Trust."
Carson was a frequent guest panelist on many popular primetime quiz
shows, including the top-rated “What’s My Line?” He also sat in
occasionally for vacationing Jack Paar as host of “The Tonight Show”
before eventually succeeding Paar as permanent host Oct. 1, 1962. What
he brought to the show, in addition to a certain polish, was that wealth
of daytime experience.
Late night, as Carson realized, was so much like
daytime, just a different time of day. And that made it easy for him to
slide into Paar's seat as if he's been doing it for years. In a sense he
had.
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Jan 25, 2005
©
2005
Media Life
-Ed Robertson is a television
historian and a regular contributor to Media Life.
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