Russell Steele writes to ask, in reference to the clip I linked to here…
Just wanted to make mention of the Tonight Show piece where Carson went to the CPO Sharkey set to razz Don Rickles about breaking his cigarette box. I remember howling at that when I was a child. I had to flinch a couple of times while watching it now due to, no other way to say it, Johnny's racist remarks. By the time he got to the "cotton picking" line, my jaw just dropped. Just curious as to your reaction these many years later.
My reaction is that I still think it's funny — though probably less so than it was then — and I don't think Johnny's remarks were racist. I think they were a parody of the kind of thing Rickles was doing at the time, starting with when he hit Don with his own signature line, calling him "you big dummy," and continuing from there. Rickles's act today is kind of "old hat" so to see someone doing to him what he did to others is also a bit dated.
This gets back to something I was discussing here the other day. If someone utters an offensive remark and no one actually takes personal offense, is it an offensive remark? I say no. Offense is in the eye (or, I guess, ear) of the offended. This is a philosophy of mine that I developed during all the years I dealt with networks and their Standards and Practices departments. There'd be a line in a script that, if you really wanted to, you could interpret as being insulting to, say, the Irish. A quivering Broadcast Standards lady would come in and say, "That's got to go. The Irish Anti-Defamation League will picket the network. Irish Senators will challenge our broadcast licenses. Small Irish children will weep and older Irish women will faint in the streets." And so on.
And then you'd talk the Standards Lady out of cutting the line and it would appear on coast-to-coast television and be seen by millions and there'd be absolutely no protest. No complaints whatsoever. Or you'd get a few postcards from people who weren't Irish but who'd say, "I just know the Irish-Americans will be deeply offended by this." In other words, someone was concerned about it being offensive but no one was actually offended enough to pick up a phone and call the station.
It would amaze me how often this happened…and you have to remember that some people will write in letters of protest and call up in shock and indignation over the damnedest things. If you have some character in a show say, "I don't like asparagus," you may well get a flood of mail and calls from asparagus lovers and asparagus farmers and The National Asparagus Council (I'll bet there is one) and so on. It is stunning when you don't get protests over something…but quite often, you don't — and over things that one might think would bring villagers with burning torches, molten tar and feathers aplenty. If someone who seemed the slightest bit serious about it were to go on TV and say, "Let's kill all the Jews," okay, that's inarguably offensive and I doubt anyone would dispute that. But if it's arguably offensive, it probably isn't; not unless and until the targeted party takes serious offense.
Carson's lines in that bit don't bother me because, well, it's Johnny Carson. Does anyone think the man was a racist? Is there one anecdote anywhere of Johnny Carson mistreating a minority? I consider myself kind of a Carson scholar and I've sure never heard one. In fact, it's actually Johnny Carson imitating Don Rickles so it's even farther removed from Carson's own reality. You can't just take the words literally. It's like the difference between Lenny Bruce saying "nigger" in his act and some prominent White Supremacist saying it in front of a rally. It isn't the same word in the two different contexts and the former probably did not offend anyone personally, at least not if they understood how and why Bruce was saying it.
I'm not saying remarks can't be offensive. I just think that if no one is personally offended — or in the case of a statement heard by millions, almost no one — then the remark is not offensive. Because it didn't offend. If and when it does, we can discuss it then.