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Most of the time, Paar is merely a good listener with a knack of asking the right questions. He may be as fast on the ad-lib draw as the next gag-toting desperado, but again and again he lets himself be "topped." He is all the world's straight man. And yet, Paar can hit. A caustic remark, a misconstrued question, a real or fancied attack in or out of the studio can provoke stinging repartee. When Winchell attacked him for a misstatement made by Elsa Maxwell on the show, Paar counterpunched fiercely, guessed—on the air—that Winchell's "high, hysterical voice" results from his "too-tight underwear." Often, Paar punches with less provocation —massive retaliation, as one of his former writers puts it—for no act of aggression. When Perfectionist Paar berates stagehands ("the tippytoe squad") for being slow, his writers for providing dull jokes, the studio audience for not laughing, it is all done in fun—but there is a serious, waspish edge in the laughter.
The same element of unpredictability—the suggestion that a mild explosive has been put into the prominently displayed tumblers of Sponsor Lipton's tea—derives from the widespread belief that Paar permits off-color humor. On the whole the charge is unjust. The show's most celebrated blue note was struck while Paar was on vacation and Stand-In Jonathan Winters allowed Anthropologist Ashley Montague to talk about how lack of breast feeding gives American males a bosom fixation. Jack says he would never have permitted it ("After breast feeding, there's just no place to go"). But Paar does occasionally tarry near the brink of the blue, and this brinksmanship is another reason why the Paar show provokes the implicit question: "What's going to happen next?" — and why the show is a hit.
The Big Gamble. When asked about Jack Paar, the late Fred Allen once said: "Oh, you mean the young man who had the meteoric disappearance." A year ago the description still fitted Paar, sometime minor movie actor and perennial radio-TV summer replacement. He had done well with a radio program and a daytime television show of his own, but never well enough to make it big. One TV executive dismissed him as strictly a "pipe and slipper type." What happened next is told by NBC's Board Chairman Robert Sarnoff: "We faced a critical decision. The America After Dark version of our Tonight show was a shambles. Sponsors were shunning the program. Some stations were defecting from the NBC late-night line-up in favor of old Hollywood movies. We were under heavy pressure to give up late-night live programing. After much soul searching we staked everything on an amiable young man named Jack Paar — and never has a network program gamble paid off more handsomely."