Johnny Carson's primacy in the history of television cannot be understated. Carson's thirty-year stint as the host of NBC's Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992 remains the measuring-stick against which success in the American media must be measured. As Bill Carter -- a New York Times journalist who wrote the substantial history of the machinations and fiascos that ensued when Carson announced his retirement, and the effort to replace Carson began -- states outright "Johnny Carson was the single biggest money generator in television history. He was also the greatest individual star the medium had ever created." (Carter 3). This is astonishing when we consider that Carson took no part in the synergistic strategies that we associate with television in 2012: he did not appear in films, or regularly promote himself elsewhere in the media, he published no memoirs (and indeed published nothing save two joke-books from the earliest years of his Tonight Show stint) and refused to cooperate with a documentary about his life. In a profile of Carson, Orson Welles was quoted as saying "he's the only invisible talk host" (Tynan 1978). It is worth asking, then, just how Carson's supremacy was achieved. I hope through an examination of Carson's work on The Tonight Show to explain the way in which Carson's understated persona became so central to American broadcasting and to the American imagination.
It is worth beginning with an analysis of how Carson's public persona was constructed. Kenneth Tynan notes that, somewhat extraordinarily, Carson's fame and success were achieved in spite of being almost completely unknown outside of the U.S.:
Outside North America…Johnny Carson is a nonentity: the general public has never heard of him. The reason for his obscurity is that the job at which he excels is virtually unexportable….The TV talk show as it is practiced by Carson is topical in subject matter and local in appeal. To watch it is like dropping in on a nightly family party, a conversational serial, full of private jokes, in which a relatively small and regularly rotated cast of characters, drawn mainly from show business, turn up to air their egos, but which has absolutely no plot…most of what happens on the show would be incomprehensible or irrelevant to foreign audiences, even if they were English-speaking. (Tynan 1978).
By this logic, then, it is worth asking how Carson managed to serve as late-night television's representative American male for thirty years. I think this is rather easily understood. For a start, Carson was a veteran of the U.S. Navy, and once quipped that the high point of his career had been performing a magic trick for the first U.S. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. To that degree, we can understand that part of his credibility and cultural centrality came from being part of the "greatest generation" and serving as a sort of representative adult, while maintaining what producer Fred de Cordova described as a "Peck's Bad Boy" quality (Tynan 1978). We must add to this that Carson was a Midwesterner, born in Iowa and raised in Nebraska. If Carson's persona carried a hint of sophistication, it was a sophistication that had to be acquired, and that was ultimately worn lightly. To some extent, it would be possible to see Carson as a kind of puckish reflection of Dwight Eisenhower -- however deliberately perverse or provocative this estimation might seem, it is a good way of understanding how Carson's combination of Great Plains wholesomeness and military service might contribute to provide a sense of representativeness for the viewing public. Just as mass military conscription in the 1940s and 1950s necessarily imposed a sense of group identity, and set the standards for permissible behavior, for an entire generation, so Carson's style of humor set the standards for permissible satire. His role as a wit was in some way representative.
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