Back when Jack Paar was hosting what we now call The Tonight Show, he was forever getting into feuds and on-air controversies. The biggest — the one that actually caused him to walk off the show in protest — came when he told a mildly scatological joke one night about a "W.C." The abbreviation has fallen out of common usage and wasn't even all that current in 1960 when the incident occurred…but it stood for Water Closet, which was then another way of saying "toilet." NBC decided to edit the joke out of the taped telecast and did. Here, in case you want to hear it, is audio of the joke as Paar delivered it that night…
Paar was upset that they cut the joke without consulting him. Mostly, he was upset that it got around that NBC had cut a "dirty joke" and that someone thought he told something truly raunchy and filth-laden. Paar felt that the press was always looking for excuses to attack him — never mind that he often attacked the press — and that the deletion would provide fodder for this attackers. He convinced the network that they'd been wrong to cut the W.C. joke but couldn't convince them to let him play it so America could hear for themselves how mild the joke was. They refused and he gave an on-air resignation. Here's audio of that broadcast…
Shortly after delivering the above, Paar exited and his announcer Hugh Downs hosted the rest of the program. It was a major story that was on the front page of every newspaper in the country the next morning. Here's Page One of the L.A. Times with a report that was continued onto this page.
As an aside: Note that the newspaper article does not say Jack Paar walked off The Tonight Show. It says he quit The Jack Paar Show. When Paar signed aboard in 1957, the word "Tonight" was still part of the show's title, though the form changed from time to time. For an extended period, it was Tonight Starring Jack Paar. By 1960 and the W.C. incident, it was just The Jack Paar Show. When he announced his final departure in 1962, they began to ease the word "Tonight" back into the name, though a lot of newspapers never picked up on that. Most TV listings just listed the name of the regular host as the name of the program.
Getting back to his first walk-off: Maybe it's just me but as I look at this whole story, I'm not sure who behaved worse — the network or Paar. They were wrong to excise the joke but he was wrong, I think, not to just come on the air and say, "It wasn't as bad as you think and the network guys were lunkheads." Paar was right that he was often getting attacked. He was wrong to think he was always an injured innocent in those attacks. The man was enormously thin-skinned for a guy who did what he did for a living.
Anyway, he disappeared for a while and finally went back to the show on March 29, 1960, having been gone since February 11. The show had guest hosts and reruns in his absence…and of course, when he returned, he got a massive tune-in. He later denied it was all a publicity stunt but it does raise the question: Why quit the way he did — on the air, a few minutes into one night's show — if all he wanted was out? I've always had the feeling that while it might not have been a calculated publicity stunt, there was some sort of neurotic need for attention that drove the whole episode.
Here's a video clip from an interview Paar gave on shipboard (!) in the early nineties. It takes a while to get started but you might enjoy hearing his summary of the incident, plus they show footage of his return to the program. I think it's significant that in the thirty years Johnny Carson did that show after Paar, Johnny had plenty of arguments with NBC, mostly over money but occasionally over control of the program…but he never found the need to walk off in the middle of a taping.