TELEVISION
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An elderly woman in Columbus, Neb., turned on her color TV set, tuned in the Tonight show, and settled back to watch Johnny Carson. "And now—here's Johnny!" called Announcer Ed McMahon as the star skipped onstage—fetchingly handsome, slat-thin, loose-limbed, and wrapped in a Continental-cut suit. "My name is Shirley Hoffnagel," he began with eyes laughing, "and I'm here to talk tonight about the wonderful progress that medical science has made in sex-change operations."
The studio audience rollicked to that line, but the lady in Nebraska rose from her chair, muttering, "That's not so funny, McGee!" With that, she swept into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. And no doubt to ponder the mysterious equations of show business that have enabled her son John to become the nation's midnight idol by telling silly jokes like that.
Mrs. Homer L. Carson knows that there is more to the equations than an occasional misfiring joke. Her son, at 41, is an institution, a cup of bedtime coffee with none of the caffeine removed. "We're more effective than birth control pills," says Carson, improvising a bit on his own slightly leering line that people watch him "through their toes"—that is, lying down in bed. On good nights in midwinter, there might be as many as 10 million viewers, according to Nielsen. But if there are fewer on other nights, Carson at least gets a crack at his audience five nights a week on NBC stations from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. (an hour earlier in the Central Time zone).
Whether they are in bed or chairs, the viewers' reward is the most consistently entertaining 90 minutes to be seen anywhere on television. Tonight was a lively enough show in the five years when it was run by that mercurial madcap Jack Paar, but since Carson took over in 1962, it has become brighter, smoother and more sophisticated. Carson's opening six-minute monologue is generally humorous, despite an unfortunate preoccupation with bathroom jokes. The rest of the bill is filled with two or three musical turns, a guest comic's bit or a mildly satirical skit, and—best of all—engaging conversations with guests who range in celebrity from Vice President Hubert Humphrey to people who are merely interesting—an Australian stowaway, a clearly spurious seer, a subway conductor turned poet.
Muzzy Hours. But Carson's chief attraction is Carson. An assured, natural entertainer—he was already a network headliner at 29—Johnny is the epitome of cool. He is intelligent, laconic, deferential and facile. On occasion, he asks the studio audience to submit questions to him on any subject. Somebody once asked: "Are women permitted in Hurley's bar [the NBC hangout in Rockefeller Center]?" Replied Carson swiftly: "Permitted to do what?"
Most of all, Carson is a master of the cozy pace and mood that he believes are appropriate for the muzzy midnight hours. Unlike Paar, he avoids meet-the-press-style interviewing, and never goes beyond his intellectual depth. Neither does he use his terrible swift wit to cut down his guests. One night, Zsa Zsa Gabor hogged the show terribly. While Carson will sometimes needle her to her face ("Any girl who has a drip-dry wedding dress can't be all bad"),