Johnny Carson

I recently read Johnny Carson by his former lawyer, Henry Bushkin (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).  I usually read biographies of people I admire, in the doomed hope that I can learn how people, with all their problems and difficulties, managed to accomplish so much.  In this case I hoped to find out what made Johnny Carson so popular, something that to me was always mysterious.  Carson could not sing, dance or act, as far as one knows and, like many comedians, he was unhappy, nasty and insecure, according to Bushkin.  Apparently he did have the ability to tell a joke, though he had writers to write the jokes and most of them were not so funny.  But also he went out of his way not to offend anyone:  asked why he did not tell political jokes he responded that he did not want to alienate any portion of his audience, a condescending but probably correct perception for much of the audience. In other words, he always played it safe and took no risks and I think that is the reason why much of his audience returned to him night after night and The Tonight Show had plenty of advertisers.  Carson's predecessors, Steve Allen and Jack Paar, often took risks and enjoyed surprising the audience:  Allen was one of the first to have Elvis Presley on his show and Paar once walked out when the network censored one of his jokes. Carson's guests also tended to be bland and inoffensive and if they weren't they were not invited back.  I was in the audience for his show once in California and for the warm up Doc Severinsen came out and humped the piano while Ed McMahon flattered the audience by saying "I can tell this is a drinking crowd!"