In 2005 when Johnny Carson died, I posted a lot of material on this blog about great moments from his Tonight Show and other remembrances. Here's a post that ran here on January 25, 2005. Read it and meet me on the other side for a very exciting update…
I just cribbed the following off the weblog of a gent named Fred Bals…
One of the funniest live moments I ever saw was on the Carson show during that summer — a guest appearance by Rose Marie (of "Dick Van Dyke" fame), whose age Carson had jokingly referred to in his introduction. Another guest — whose identity I've long forgotten — mentioned the joke to Rose Marie, and compounded it by saying that Carson had claimed that when they were building the first stage, Rose Marie held the hammer.
"Ooookay," a mock-angry Rose Marie said, smiled at Carson, stood up and walked off the set. In close order, each of the other guests got up, smiled at Carson, and also left, until only McMahon was there. And then he got up and left, leaving Carson with what must have been the living embodiment of a talk show host's nightmare.
"Is it time to go to a commercial?" he asked. "Not for five minutes," came the offstage reply as the audience roared.
A desperate Carson eventually went into a stripper act, peeling down to his bare chest, as the orchestra blared out "The Stripper." And then all the male guests returned to the stage, each of them bare-chested too, as the audience went into hysterics.
Well, you had to be there. And it was funny, funny enough to me that I can still remember the details from a show I saw only once nearly 40 years ago. They cut to a commercial, and when the show came back on, Carson and the bare-chested guests were seated and he looked into the camera and dead-panned, "Welcome to Rawhide."
I remember that night and it was just as funny as Fred recalls. The guests were Debbie Reynolds, Carl Reiner and John Byner…and then Rose Marie came out. When Carson introduced her, he got the words all botched up and it sounded like he was saying she was ancient. She came out and Johnny apologized for the awkward intro. She said she hadn't heard it backstage. Johnny said, "Good," and tried to move on but Reiner loudly announced, "John Byner will tell you what he said."
Byner (and hey, there's a very funny man who isn't on television nearly enough) said, "He implied that when they build the first stage, you held the hammer." Just like Fred recalled. Johnny kept trying to explain and apologize but he just kept making it worse and worse until finally, all the guests walked off on him. And then it happened just as Fred said. To fill time, Johnny started doing a mock striptease, taking off his jacket, tie, shoes, socks and shirt. When Reiner, Byner and Ed McMahon came back out, they all had their shirts off, too.
I'm guessing this was in 1969 or 1970 because I recall discussing it the next day with a friend of mine who I haven't seen since around then. A very funny moment…and one that I suspect is lost forever due to all the tapes that have been destroyed over the years. Carson's company has most of the shows from the mid-seventies and up but only a few before then. A couple of the older clips, like Ed Ames and that tomahawk we're all sick of seeing, exist only because they were repeated in anniversary shows.
And we're back live. Note please that Mr. Bals and I were swapping memories of a moment we saw once on TV in 1969 and never again. And it was one that I suspected no longer existed.
Well, it does. I just found an upload of it on YouTube and you're about to see it.
The other guest in it whose name Fred couldn't recall is, I believe, George "Goober" Lindsey from The Andy Griffith Show. This is from the years when Johnny was based in New York and would bring his show out to NBC Burbank from time to time, as was the case with this episode. I once asked Rose Marie about it and she said it was in no way planned. I am not sure that I believe that but it was darned funny then and darned funny now…