Recently here, we discussed the vital issue of who should be included in the exalted list of past Tonight Show hosts. It usually comes down to Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, with Conan O'Brien in the On Deck circle.
Which causes some of us to ask: What about Jack Lescoulie and Al "Jazzbeaux" Collins, who hosted the odd version of Tonight that came 'twixt Allen and Paar? What about Joan Rivers, who was Mr. Carson's permanent guest host for a long time? Or Joey Bishop, who wasn't a "permanent guest host" but who sat behind Johnny's desk almost as often as he sat behind his own on The Joey Bishop Show?
And hey, what about one other guy? When Steve Allen hosted Tonight, he did Monday through Friday, five nights a week, no reruns…and the show was an hour and 45 minutes long. In 1956, he added an hour-long Sunday night show to his workload and when that eventually proved to be too much, he turned Tonight over to another host for Monday and Tuesday nights. That host was Ernie Kovacs.
I said in the previous post I wasn't sure how long Kovacs had hosted. Al Quagliata, who operates The Ernie Kovacs Blog, sent me the answer. Kovacs hosted Tonight for two weeks in August of 1955 while Allen was filming The Benny Goodman Story. Then on Monday, October 1 of 1956, Ernie began doing Monday and Tuesdays and he continued through Tuesday, January 22, 1957. This isn't a lot of hosting. At most, it's ten days in '55 and then a stint of 34 days…only it may be less because both Christmas and New Year's Day fell on Tuesdays during that period and they may have taken some nights off.
So you can draw up your own rules here. A lot of Johnny's guest hosts hosted more than 44 episodes. Joey Bishop hosted 177 times. Joan Rivers did 93 and Bob Newhart handled 87. In addition to them and Leno, you have folks like John Davidson, Bill Cosby, Jimmy Dean, McLean Stevenson, David Letterman, Garry Shandling and David Brenner. They all hosted more Tonight Shows than Ernie Kovacs and there are still others. On the other hand, these people were all billed as guest hosts. Kovacs presumably was for his two weeks in '55 but for the other 34 (or less), it was "Tonight starring Ernie Kovacs."
I don't have an answer here. I could make the case that Kovacs belongs on the list because, brief as his stint was, it was his show those nights. The permanent host is "in charge" of his program in a sense that no guest host could be. Or I could flip and make the case that Joey Bishop and perhaps a dozen others hosted Tonight more times than Ernie Kovacs…so if you include him, you gotta include them.
I'm inclined to favor the former for what's probably a bad reason. I really like Ernie Kovacs. Talk about your television pioneers. Moreover, I think people forget what a funny man he was. All the retrospectives seem to focus on the visual gags on his shows, many of which were as much the creation of his writers and tech crew, and many of which were merely a matter of figuring out how to replicate Buster Keaton material in a TV studio. Where Kovacs (to me) soared was when he was just talking as himself or occasionally when he was playing a character. I'd love to see those old Tonight episodes he did, largely because I'm assuming there's a lot of Ernie being Ernie. Al Quagliata informs me that the Paley Center has a few clips from them totalling about a half hour's worth of material. He also writes…
My reason for wanting Ernie added is that he is, as far as I'm concerned, the originator of the TV sketch form that these late night programs (and SNL, SCTV, Uncle Floyd, Monty Python, et al) owe their success to. He was doing these things on TV in Philly before anyone else. He could have cared less about the interview portion as the clips of his tenure on Tonight will attest to (one of the reasons why NBC never made him the regular host after Steve Allen left).
Obviously, Ernie Kovacs deserves massive recognition for his many contributions to early television. I don't know that he originated the TV sketch form…and to the extent he did, that's a separate consideration from whether he qualifies as a host of Tonight in the same sense as Allen, Paar, Carson and Leno. My understanding is that Allen occasionally did sketches on his Tonight.
I'm also under the impression that the reason Kovacs didn't succeed Allen as full-time host is that NBC's execs had arrived at the idea that no one person could sustain Tonight for very long. That was why they turned to a multi-host, magazine format that made it more like Today and less of an entertainment program. Somewhere — darned if I can remember where — I read that when that format bombed, they scurried to restore the one-host entertainment format and inquired as to Ernie's interest or availability. He was by then off shooting a movie and had a contract for another to follow…so they went with Paar.
(And they still didn't think they needed to get back to what Allen and Kovacs were doing. Their original idea was to fill the time slot with three game shows, all hosted by Paar. It was largely because they couldn't pull that together quickly that they went with a talk show format.)
But hey, Ernie Kovacs was one of television's original geniuses. Would that more of his material was out on DVD. It keeps being rumored but never seems to happen. Maybe it would open up that marketplace if we reminded more people of the things he did, including hosting Tonight. So sign me up for that campaign. We can worry later about Jack Lescoulie.