Okay, let's watch a little Johnny Carson. Here are three clips in a row. The first is Richard Nixon chatting with Carson in one of those conversations where, obviously, lines have been written in advance, and the host is cuing those lines, to make a politician seem wittier than he really is. I was told that at some point during the Vietnam War, Johnny had a change of mind or heart and he decided to not do that any longer. He would not have politicians on because, he said, he felt people like that should be quizzed by newspeople and not by comedians, and that it was doing the public a disservice to contribute to the establishment of a false image. This new policy was not set in concrete and he occasionally strayed from it…but for the most part, Carson stopped having guests who were angling to be on ballots.
Then comes a clip from the famous night that George Gobel had to follow Bob Hope and Dean Martin. And then we have a rooster taking a dump on Johnny's desk. Conan O'Brien has recently had on a duck named Quackers who does the same cute trick, proving that late night television has only evolved so far in all these years.
This is a LikeTV embed, which means that the clip may roll on and show you other things after the material I'm spotlighting. Watch the other stuff at your own peril. (It varies every time you load the page so I can't predict what it will be.)
