I can't embed today's video on this site but you can click the link below and go watch it on YouTube. You should.
It's another complete Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson from back when the show was ninety minutes. This one's older than the last one I posted and it even has commercials in it. The guests include Alan King and Raquel Welch (who join Johnny in a sketch mid-show) and Pigmeat Markham. This one aired June 19, 1968 and you'll be impressed with how good the picture is on this video.
Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham was a popular comedian for many years, mostly on the "Chitlin' Circuit" of night clubs and theaters that catered mostly to black audiences. He enjoyed a national notoriety in the late sixties when the Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In TV show usurped his "Here comes the judge" routine and for a while, added him to their cast.
You'll notice a couple of different things about the Tonight Show format. For a time, each episode started with Ed McMahon welcoming viewers and promising Johnny would be right out…and then throwing to the first commercial break. This got a commercial break out of the way so they didn't come quite as often during the show. Johnny stopped doing that when he started getting more competition and the shows opposite him started with the show itself.
Also in '68, Johnny's show wasn't followed by anything that he or the network cared about. Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show didn't start until October of '73. Before that, local stations either programmed reruns or old movies after Johnny…or signed off the air. As a result, the mood of the last part of The Tonight Show sometimes had a kind of "time to go to bed" mood, as this episode does, ending as it does with the band playing a sleepy rendition of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix…"
The pace of the whole show is a bit slower than later years but there are some fun moments in it, including a Rexall commercial with Louis Nye. Enjoy, won't you?