From the E-Mailbag…

From Frank Conniff comes this message…

In my opinion, the best Carson Tribute would that NBC could have done would have been to show five Carson shows in their entirety all this week with short wraparounds by Leno at the beginning and end.

It's my understanding that something of the sort was discussed, not necessarily with Leno doing bookends. Apparently, Carson Productions, which owns all of Johnny's old shows, didn't want that. Just as they don't want a public memorial service, they've declined a lot of proposals which would have made the mourning period too long or too elaborate. One presumes this is in keeping with how Johnny would have wanted it.

Roy Currlin notes…

…you mentioned no one has rerun a clip on a night when a guest host was on. Carson actually did a couple of times…a clip of Bobby Kennedy when Harry Belafonte was sitting in.

You're right. I am also told by a couple of Beatles authorities that they've never seen the episode where Joe Garagiola was guest hosting and John Lennon and Paul McCartney came on to announce they were starting up this thing called Apple Corps. The tapes, it is said, no longer exist. (Here's a web page that has some photos of that broadcast, which occurred on May 14, 1968, and this page has a partial transcript. Reportedly, Garagiola was ill-prepared to conduct the interview and he just kept saying over and over, "Boy, my kids are gonna be so impressed that I met you guys.")

Hey, I'll tell you the clip I would kill to see in full. (I have a partial video of it.) One night back in the early seventies, Joey Bishop was guest-hosting when Albert Brooks came out and did the single funniest routine I've ever seen on The Tonight Show. It wasn't exactly stand-up. He was seated in a chair, calmly explaining how he had run out of material but he was doing the show anyway to plug his new album…and then, after two or three minutes of that, he said, "Oh, I could get laughs if I wanted to…" and then he hit himself with a pie, sprayed himself with seltzer, dropped his pants, broke eggs on his head, etc. But of course, he explained, that kind of stuff was too easy and below the standard he'd set for himself…so he was just going to get out of show business. And he waddled off into a spotlight with his pants still around his ankles and waved goodbye to show business.

The audience was in hysterics and applauding their heads off and I think they were on their feet, which was rare back then. And when the camera cut back to Joey Bishop, you could see that Bishop didn't understand the routine. The folks in the audience got it but he didn't, and that made it even funnier.

I remember seeing that and aching from laughter. But at the same time, I was thinking, "I'll never get to see that again…I can't show it to anyone." This was before any of us even had Betamaxes. The better shows with Johnny were rerun on weekends and during vacation periods as The Best of Carson…and if Johnny had been behind the desk that night, the Brooks spot alone would have guaranteed that episode would get rerun. But they never reran guest host shows.

Like I said, I do have a partial video of it, but it's minus Bishop's intro and post-bit bewilderment, plus the end of the routine itself was trimmed off. A lot of Tonight Show comedy just doesn't work as well out of that quasi-live, "real time" context. I'd love to find a complete copy if it exists. For that matter, I'd love to find a tape of all of Brooks's old stand-up routines. Nobody funnier.