His animal segments with Joan and Jim were some of my favorite ones! Carson was very funny and he didn’t need a lot of words to be so. Sometimes no words were needed and instead it was just an expression or body movement. And rarely ever, if ever, was politics mentioned. He was liberal but you would have had a very hard time telling just from watching his non-political shows.
Those of you who watched Carson back in the day will remember that he made fun of everyone. I don’t even know if he was a liberal or a conservative based on his monologues. In the few episodes I watched he poked fun at former President’s Nixon, Reagan and Carter. That’s because he knew his job was to entertain everyone regardless of our political proclivity.
That doesn’t mean that Carson didn’t have strong views and opinions. According to Wikipedia, “Carson opposed the Vietnam War and capital punishment, favored racial equality, and was against criminalizing extramarital sex and pornography. He avoided explicitly mentioning his views on The Tonight Show, saying he “hates to be pinned down” as that would “hurt me as an entertainer, which is what I am.” As he explained in 1970, “In my living room I would argue for liberalization of abortion laws, divorce laws, and there are times when I would like to express a view on the air. I would love to have taken on Billy Graham. But I’m on TV five nights a week; I have nothing to gain by it and everything to lose.” He also seldom invited political figures onto the Tonight Show because he “didn’t want it to become a political forum” and did not want the show used, by himself or others, to influence the opinions of the viewers.
https://www.thefencepost.com/news/talk-show-hosts-could-learn-from-johnny-carson/
So true, Larry!
His shows were in a league of their own in quality and type compared to what has come after him.
You'll like his comment in the first one. "I didn't know you're Jewish!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKKaPrZnATk
More to come!
Yep, that was classic Carson with a great one liner! I was too young to watch it that far back (I was a sleeping little kid), but I’ve seen that hilarious Ed Ames episode many times on YouTube.
I started watching it in the mid 1970s.
Interesting. I just looked him up at his Wiki and Ed Ames was Jewish! I didn’t know til now. Johnny didn’t know based on his joke. So, that’s why he aimed for the crotch <G>! He wasn’t religious though: