The Magician of 3,328 Midnights

By JAY COCKS

Celebrating 20 years of "Heere 's Johnny "

From a Norfolk, Neb., high school yearbook, 1943: "To one of the finest comedians that has hit school. If you aren't killed in the war, you'll really make good."

The historical hedge is curious. "One of the finest ..." Is it possible that Norfolk produced some other talent that elected to hang around Main Street or stay down on the farm? Can it be that somewhere in the great Midwest there is a native-born comedian who opens a meeting of the Jaycees with seven minutes of stand-up comedy, then brings on the other members of the chamber to sit on a sofa and spin out their schemes and notions for promotion? Is there, somewhere, another Johnny Carson?

Not likely. He has eased America through 3,328 midnights on the Tonight show with wit, some surprises and shrewd, guarded irreverence. It should be clear by now, and from comparison with his legion of imitators and disciples, that he is unique--no longer, perhaps, in what he does, but for how well and how consistently he does it. When the Midwest brought forth Johnny Carson, it produced a bumper crop of one.

Carson will celebrate his 20th anniversary in customary fashion this Sunday, Oct. 3, with a two-hour special (NBC, 9-11 p.m. E.D.S.T.) that will feature the usual complement of comedy, conversation and glitz, along with video-taped glimpses at the family album. If a few things go wrong along the way, so much the better. Carson's comedy thrives on crisis. It is fueled by failure. Carson craves bad jokes. They are the rough sand he turns into pearls.

The nightly monologue has evolved into a sequence of snappy asides that is virtually fail-safe. If the jokes hit home, fine. Carson will smile and bob his head and smooth his tie while the audience laughs. If the joke flies wide or falls flat, the audience will groan and Carson will look wounded, then drop some self-deprecating aside that, like a slow fuse, will finally ignite the gag. Dick Cavett, who worked for Carson as a writer, recalls that Carson "made a point of bombing and making it funny. Sometimes you'd write strictly for that. You'd set up one baddie, just for the saver." A lot of comedians have done this, but none has raised the art to such rococo refinements as Carson, who can now paralyze an audience with one-liners that would get lesser comics boiled in oil.

"Johnny is the best," George Burns remarked recently. "You can't be on television 20 years without being a big talent. It's so intimate that if Johnny weren't so honest and sincere and funny, you'd know it. I wish he had married my sister Goldie." But with all honor to Goldie's memory, this does not address the full question of Carson's appeal. In a fleet and surprisingly touching documentary called Johnny Goes Home, aired last February and well worth repeating, Carson is seen revisiting many of his boyhood haunts, including his high school, and being greeted with a surprise birthday party during half time at a Friday-night football game. Carson wipes away some tears and says to his family, "You're blowing my image here. I'm cruel and aloof, don't you know that?"

This image, which has received wide circulation, seems always to have rankled Carson and somewhat baffled his associates, past and present. Such diverse hands as Cavett, professional Wild Man Pat McCormick and Writer-Director Marshall Brickman, who all put in typewriter-time at the Carson Stables, speak not only of his considerable editorial skills but of his ease as an employer. If Carson, on camera, suggests simultaneously a verbal glibness and an emotional reserve, that is usually considered Midwestern; it is the same reserve that is the core of his charm and longevity. His audiences derive from Carson not only a few good laughs a night (no mean average five times a week) but the cool comfort of a man who is not desperate to be known. For America, after two decades, Carson is much more than a casual acquaintance. But he never exacts the emotional burdens of a close friend. "He's sort of like everybody's hip uncle in show business," says David Letterman, who is currently applying the lessons of the master on his own late-night comedy show.

Carson's precision-tooled comedic skills owe much, as Cavett points out, to certain illustrious forebears: Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bob Hope--"and Oliver Hardy--that burn, that long look into the lens." Surely Jonathan Winters was the inspiration for such Carson characters as the garrulous Aunt Blabby, the right-wing dimwit Floyd R. Turbo, even the huckstering greaseball Art Fern. Carnac the Magnificent is Steve Allen's Answer Man in swami's drag, and the Mighty Carson Art Players are Fred Allen's Mighty Allen Art Players with unreliable props. Carson's borrowings are leavened with respect and an originality that will run a thematic risk--"take left turns," as McCormick says--without becoming reckless. "He had an unfailing instinct for what would resonate, of what would work for him," says Brickman, who recalls with admiration how Carson withstood one writer who tried to get him to revamp the traditional Washington's Birthday skit by impersonating a cherry tree.

Carson provides nightly exhibitions of almost unrivaled technical skills, little seminars in comedy and verbal brinkmanship that can be both tutorials for the trade and, for the paying customers, a standard against which other stand-up comedy is measured. In Johnny Goes Home, Carson is shown doing something else uncharacteristic: losing his grip. Dangling from a railroad bridge as a freight rumbles above him, his arms give out and he tumbles into the water close beneath. Walking ashore, he laughs and says, "If I'd waited another five seconds I would have made it." Historians of comedy, take note: this may be the only recorded occasion on which Johnny Carson missed his timing. Of such moments are anniversaries spun, and history made.

Excerpt from a 1977 press conference with Carson: Q. What would you like your epitaph to be? A. I'll be right back. --By Jay Cocks. Reported by Peter Ainslie/New York and Russell Leavitt/ Los Angeles

With reporting by Peter Ainslie, Russell Leavitt

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