A reader of this website named Summer writes to ask…
Interesting about Saturday Night Live maybe changing the tape for a rerun or the West Coast broadcast. You're sort of an expert on The Tonight Show so maybe you could tell me if Carson ever did this? Did they ever edit reruns or the West Coast broadcast?
Well, I know of one instance where they did both with the same show, but I have to tell this without divulging one name. There was a TV star (we'll call him Joe Blow) who did a series that was a rather spectacular flop — so big that Carson took to doing jokes about the failure in his monologue. A friend of Joe's who also knew Carson went to Johnny and asked him to stop with the digs. He said, "You have every right to do them but I thought you ought to know that Joe's daughter is dying and he's had a nervous breakdown. In fact, one of the reasons his show was so poor was that he was in a deep depression all through the taping." Johnny had not known about Joe's problem so he immediately stopped mentioning Joe and phoned the man to apologize. He also told his staff to make sure those jokes were edited out of those shows if and when they were rerun.
About nine months later, one of those episodes was rerun and one of the jokes was left in…but only in New York. The fellow who'd intervened with Carson had a friend in New York who saw the show when it was run there. The New York guy called the friend out here who then tracked Johnny down on his vacation and told him. Carson immediately phoned and ordered the joke edited out of the West Coast broadcast.
There were a few times when jokes were cut out of a rerun because, for example, they were about someone who had died since the show originally aired. This, however, was the only time I know of when the edit was done between the East Coast and West Coast transmissions. They generally did it sparingly because a cut in Johnny's monologue was usually pretty obvious. I remember watching a rerun one time when there was an abrupt cutaway to a shot of the studio audience laughing. You never saw the audience when Johnny was delivering the monologue but you did (briefly) that night. Between that and a jump in the audio, I think my grandmother could have spotted that something had been edited out. This occurred not long after Elvis Presley died and I guessed that what was cut was one of those jokes about him being too overweight to fit into his blue suede shoes or whatever.