For Laughing Out Loud

by Ed McMahon

  Every audience worried that Johnny wouldn't be hosting the show that night. "Boy," I'd begin, "I don't know how to tell you this, but we have a real mix-up tonight. The girl who does the scheduling went out to lunch and had three martinis. When she came back to set up the schedule she got the whole thing screwed up. So Johnny, Doc, and I are all here on the same night."

  The more personal the warm-up seemed, the better the audience responded. If someone coughed, for example, I'd pause and sympathize with them. "Oh, that's a terrible cough," I'd say. "I'm sure we must be selling something for that. Oh, we're selling Formula 44 tonight, we'll get you some. Formula 44 . . . You ever wonder what went wrong with all the formulas from one to forty-three?"

  Finally I'd introduce Doc Severinsen. "I call him Tiffany Lips, he calls me Golden Throat. Tommy Newsom, what can I say about Tommy Newsom?" I would wonder and then pause as if I were trying to think of something, then pause a little longer, then start to say something but stop. "Well, nothing actually." The band would play, and we would open the show.

  Doc, Tommy, Skitch, Freddy, the band, the crew, our guests, the writers—we all played important roles in the show's success, but The Tonight Show had the longest run of any entertainment program in television history because of one person, and that person was the beautiful and gracious Aunt Blabby, the amazing El Moldo, the incredible Carnac, the frenetic Art Fern, the sincere Floyd R. Turbo, and the innocent and slightly naive man from Nebraska, Johnny Carson. Johnny brought to The Tonight Show a blend of extraordinary abilities. He was a terrific stand-up comedian, a fine interviewer, a great ad-libber, and he had perfect comic timing, and he built the show around these abilities.

  Johnny did not write his monologues; with everything else he had to do that would have been impossible. The writers would submit fifty or sixty jokes and he would pick the jokes he wanted, find a thread, and weave them together. But the jokes really just served as a starting point for his nightly conversation with America. Generally, the monologue included jokes from several different categories. For example, there were always a few topical jokes, allowing Johnny to comment on the day's news. "Teachers in Newark, New Jersey, are striking for higher pay," he'd explain. "I don't know, I think they need it. Apparently they have to pay for their own bullets."

  He did a lot of political jokes, but he was an equal opportunity comedian. Even after watching him for three decades, people still didn't know his politics. When Republican president George Bush attempted to relate to inner-city kids by showing them how to fly cast, for example, Johnny said, "He also showed them how to signal from their schooners when they run out of Grey Poupon." And when Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright was forced to resign because he'd circumvented House rules by making thousands of dollars selling his book to supporters, Johnny suggested, "Part of his deal was that he would resign if the committee bought ten thousand copies of his book."

  You didn't appreciate that joke? As Johnny would say in this situation, "You're the kind of people who would give condoms to pandas."

  The targets of his monologue were often things viewers could relate to in their own lives, from the company cafeteria—"I asked the waitress what was on the menu today. She said it was a dead fly"—to the company itself—"I got a Christmas card from General Electric today. It said, 'In lieu of a gift, a GE employee has been laid off in your name.' " After the laugh, he added, "I guess that joke blows my chance of being employee of the month."

  And somewhere in just about every monologue, he'd make reference to me or Doc or Tommy. "Ed drinks a lot but he never gets in trouble," he told the audience one night. "If he gets a little loud, a friendly bartender pours two warning shots over his head."

  When a joke or several flopped, which happened on occasion, the audience would groan or, on occasion, even hiss. That was their role in the monologue. It's difficult to explain a groaner. But if you heard one, you'd groan. Johnny would respond, "Hoo-kay," and continue bravely ahead. "Never buy jokes from people on the street," he might explain after several jokes had died. "Give 'em a quarter, but never buy a joke from 'em."

  And each night, he'd finish the monologue with one of TV 's best-known and imitated gestures—a golf swing. I have absolutely no idea why he started doing that golf swing. Maybe he thought it would help him beat Paar.

  Now you know how to recognize a groaner.

  The thing that made Johnny such a good interviewer was that he listened to his guests, whether he was speaking to Martin Luther King or Tiny Tim, and he responded directly to their answers. He didn't just ask a list of questions, he had a conversation. Before the show, a talent coordinator would interview the guests and suggest what we called "islands of conversation." For example, "Ask him about the night he slept under a pregnant elephant." But most often, Johnny wouldn't get to these notes; he'd find something that interested him and go to that. When guest hosts would ask me how to do the show, I'd tell them, "In hosting this show you have to have the curiosity of a child and you have to listen, because your next question is in the last answer. And if you don't ask it, the audience is going to feel deprived." The first night a legendary comedian hosted the show, our guest was the brilliant Scatman Crothers, who was then starring in Chico and the Man. He was the perfect guest; he'd been in show business for two hundred years, he'd performed at Lincoln's inauguration, and he was a great storyteller. So he told the guest host, "Boy, I'm nervous tonight. You know, in my career I've done just about everything. I was in vaudeville, I was in burlesque, radio, television, I've done just about everything you can do in show business, but you know what, until tonight I was never nervous."

  That is technically known in the world of professional straight men as a slam dunk, the perfect setup. There is only one possible response to that statement. And obviously Scatman Crothers had his answer ready for that question. He may have had a whole routine built around that question. But we will never know because the nervous host asked him, "So how long do you think Chico and the Man will go on?"

  Like so many guest hosts, this comedian was so concerned about his next question that he just didn't listen. Johnny listened, which allowed him to deliver the perfect ad-lib. I'm going to tell you a show business secret: some ad-libs are more ad-libbed than others. Sometimes ad-libs are actually scripted, but Johnny rarely resorted to prepared material. He didn't need it. Most of the funniest things he ever did could not have been planned. I'll give you an example. The first time Muhammad Ali appeared on the show, when he was still known as Cassius Clay, he was in training for his first major fight at Madison Square Garden. No one knew too much about him, but his brash personality, his poetry, his ability to name the round in which he was going to knock out his opponent, and his insistence that he was the greatest had made him very controversial. Johnny asked him what he would do if his opponent, Doug Jones, beat him.

  In his own shy, humble way, Ali replied, "If Doug Jones beats me, I'll get down on my hands and knees, crawl across the ring, kiss his feet, tell him, 'Man, you are the greatest,' then go to the airport and get the next jet out of the country."

  By the time the laughter had died down, Johnny had the perfect response. "Yeah, but you just can't go in that ring with all that insecurity. I mean, you do that, and he'll kill you."

  Johnny could get more out of less than any performer I've ever seen. One night we had a woman accordion player on the show and just as she was about to perform, she confided to Carson, "Well, Doc said . . ." Then she looked over to the band and asked Doc Severinsen, "You told me I could call you Doc?"

  That's all Johnny had to hear. "He's not a medical doctor," Johnny explained. "Did he tell you he was a medical doctor? Did he try that old routine about being a medical doctor again? We've had some problems about that here in the studio . . ."

  People generally agree that Jack Benny, whose character was the cheapest man in the world, got the longest laugh in radio history when he replied to a robber's demand, "Your money or your life . . . ," with complete silence.
And then more silence. The longer the silence lasted, the louder the laughter. Finally, when the robber began repeating his demands, Jack Benny interrupted him and said, "I'm thinking it over."

  I think Johnny Carson got the longest laugh in TV history the night Ed Ames, who played an Indian named Mingo on the series Daniel Boone, demonstrated how to throw a tomahawk. Ames was supposed to teach Johnny the correct way of tossing a hatchet by throwing it at the outline of a man drawn on a large wooden board, then Johnny would try it. But when Ames threw his hatchet, it landed right where a man should not be struck. I mean, bull's-eye. Let me describe it this way: if it had been a bull, after this it no longer would have been. These were the kind of moments Johnny just lived for. The audience was hysterical; I looked at him and I could almost see his mind whirling. It was like a computer searching for the proper response. Ames immediately began moving forward to retrieve his hatchet, but Johnny grabbed him. Johnny was holding two hatchets, and he stood there sharpening those hatchets as he waited for the laughter to subside. His timing was impeccable. Finally, at just the right moment, he told Ames, "I didn't even know you were Jewish." That started the laughter all over again, and when that wave quieted down, he announced, "Welcome to Frontier Briss."

  Eventually the audience calmed down, and an obviously embarrassed Ed Ames asked, "You want to try it?"

  Johnny shook his head no, saying, "I couldn't hurt him any more than you did."

  Not all of Carson's ad-libs were verbal. He did a lot of great physical humor on the show. I remember one evening when things got completely out of control. Believe me, none of this stuff could be planned. Johnny got into an egg fight with Dom DeLuise, which ended with Carson dropping an egg down the front of DeLuise's pants and then breaking it. Johnny then turned around and started throwing eggs at me. At me! Finally Burt Reynolds came out with a can of whipped cream. After spraying just about everything, Reynolds put the can down the front of Johnny's pants and squirted whipped cream straight down. Now here was Carson's genius. When he took the can from Reynolds, I'm sure everyone expected him to squirt it down Reynolds's pants. I know I did. But instead, he put it down his own pants and, with a big smile on his face, squirted it again.

  I don't know how many people can say, as I can, that for thirty-four years I looked forward to going to work every day. When I started in television in Philadelphia, we were thrilled simply to be on the air. All the programming I did was live and anything was possible. Television really wasn't so much of a business in those days as a wonder. Of course, that changed very fast. By the time we started doing The Tonight Show, TV had become a very profitable, professional business and every minute of every show was carefully planned and rehearsed. What made The Tonight Show so much fun for me as well as for our audience was that we treated it like a live show. Even though we taped in advance, we rarely edited anything out of the tape. Most of the things that happened on the show weren't planned and weren't rehearsed. I think Johnny probably expressed it best one night when expert Jim Fowler brought a marmoset, a monkey, on the show. As this monkey climbed to the highest ground on the stage, in this case Johnny's head, Johnny said, "Name me one other place in this entire world of four and a half billion people where a man is sitting with a marmoset on his head . . ."

  To which I added, being completely supportive, "If you turn sideways the tail is extended and it's very cute."

  And after doing the show for all those years, when I look back on it, I really have only one thing I want to say to Mr. Carson: Nietzsche?

  5

  The only things scripted on The Tonight Show were commercials and sketches, so most of the time I too had to ad-lib my part. And as I look back over those wonderful years, I remember with great happiness some of my favorite ad-libs. For example, how could I ever forget, "That was terrific, Johnny." Or, "No kidding?" And, "Yes, I do, all the time." Here's one from the early days of the show: "Really? That's amazing." One that the audience loved was, "Boy, right on this show." Then there are the classics like, "How big was it?" "How high was it?" and "How cold was it?". . .

  As we all know, sometimes life isn't fair. While Johnny got to sit and talk with Raquel Welch, I got to hold up a can of Budweiser. No one ever successfully defined my role on the show. Originally I was hired to do announcements and live commercials, but the job expanded quickly. Besides the billboards and commercials, I did the five-spot with Johnny, I was there when he needed someone to play off, I acted in sketches, and for most of our run I worked with our guest hosts when Johnny took the night off. For someone who seemingly had very little to do, I did a lot of it.

  As the famous troubadour Steve Martin sang during his first appearance on the show, "We're gonna have a lot of fun. We got laughter, we got surprises. We got forty-seven minutes of commercials . . ." Admittedly, at times The Tonight Show seemed to be one long commercial interrupted occasionally by entertainment, but that's why it's called show business. The importance given our sponsors on the show is probably best exemplified by my greeting to the forty-five million viewers of Tiny Tim's wedding to seventeen-year-old Miss Vicki in 1969. "We cordially request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki right here on The Tonight Show," I told the largest audience we ever had. "But right now, here are some words of wisdom from Pepto-Bismol tablets."

  I can't begin to estimate how many commercials I did for how many products on the show. But the most amazing thing is how few of the thousands of demonstrations I did went wrong. When I started doing the show, like every commercial spokesperson, every salesman, I was afraid that something would go wrong on the air. That happened for the first time about three or four years after we started doing the show. And the sponsor's reaction really surprised me. The product was a tape recorder, I think the company was called Voice Magic, and we had to get special permission from the Federal Communications Commission to record my voice on the air, then play it back. In rehearsal it worked perfectly. But on the air something went wrong; the recorder didn't work. So I fumbled around with it, then started doing the spot all over again. It just didn't work. It was supposed to be a sixty-second commercial; by the time I was finished, it probably ran about five minutes. I felt awful. This poor sponsor was paying a lot of money to demonstrate this wonderful product and somehow I had screwed it up. That's the end of that sponsor, I thought.

  I was completely wrong. The company loved the attention, they loved the fact that everyone was talking about the commercial that didn't work. They got more name recognition because the spot failed than they ever would have gotten had it worked. Instead of canceling, they extended their commercial commitment.

  I don't think we ever lost a sponsor because something went wrong. On those rare occasions when a demonstration failed, I tried to correct it immediately. One night, for example, I was doing a spot for a plastic wrap and to show how this particular wrap sealed so tightly, I was to fill a glass with red wine, stretch the plastic over the mouth of the glass, and then turn it upside down to show that no wine spilled out of the glass. Again, it worked perfectly in rehearsal. But when I did it live on the air, I accidentally overlapped the wrapping, creating a ridge, so that when I turned it upside down, the wine poured out. The audience thought it was hysterical. I was laughing, but only on the outside.

  I knew it was my fault and I intended to correct it. So I picked up my plastic wrap, my wine bottle, and my glass and I walked over to Johnny's desk. I poured the wine in the glass and put down the bottle. Then very carefully I took the plastic wrap and stretched it over the mouth of the glass. As I did this, Johnny was watching very closely; he wasn't really sure what I had in mind.

  Then I held the glass over Johnny's head and turned it upside down. Not a drop spilled. "Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen," I said. "I think I proved my point." Now, that was a pretty brave thing to do. Suppose the wrap leaked again? Oh sure, when I went to look for my next job I would have had two minutes of great television, but . . .

  It
wasn't always my fault when something went wrong. One night, for Lipton tea, I believe, I was supposed to show viewers how simple it was to brew a cup of instant tea. Unfortunately, our propman forgot to fill the pitcher with water. When I went to pour the water in the glass, the pitcher was empty. I laughed, the audience laughed, and I explained that if I had water, I would have shown viewers how easy it was to make this delicious drink in their own homes, and then I added, "In fact, it's a drink our propman could be enjoying in his own home tomorrow night, because he certainly won't be here."

  Certainly the best-known commercial we ever did was for our wonderful longtime sponsor, Alpo dog food. Whenever possible I liked to test a product before I agreed to do their commercials. That worked just fine in the case of Anheuser-Busch, for example—actually the cases of Anheuser-Busch; however, with Alpo, I took our dog's bark for it. I always had a warm spot in my heart for Alpo. The name came from the fact that it was invented in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was just being sold locally when I started in Philadelphia and it was one of my early sponsors. I loved the fact that I started doing Alpo commercials when it was a small company and grew with it as it became the largest-selling dog food in America.

  Alpo was one of our first sponsors when Johnny and I started doing The Tonight Show. The spots never changed very much; as I read my copy, a very hungry dog would demonstrate just how much dogs loved Alpo by gulping it down. Now, the truth is that we made sure that the dog would love Alpo by giving him only a small taste of it during the afternoon rehearsal. By the time we did the show in the evening, I guarantee you, that dog was hungry. Although we used all kinds of breeds, for a long time our regular was a beautiful English sheepdog named Patrick. One night Patrick must have had other plans, because we were using a beagle named Hernandez. The commercial started normally enough; I was sitting on a chair on a raised platform holding up a can of dog food. "Alpo is the only one of the leading dog foods that has real beef . . . ," I began, and at that point the dog was supposed to run to his bowl and start eating. But Hernandez had stage fright. As I continued, "The real beef could be the reason Hernandez here . . . ," Hernandez walked away. I tried to coax him back, "Com'ere, come on, come here, here it is, come on up, come on . . ." He took one bite, then turned and walked away. The audience started laughing, but I persisted. I took my commercials seriously. "He's a little frightened," I apologized for the dog. "Come on, come on, dog . . . well, Hernandez is a little . . ."