Sail on Johnny Carson...

[MelliJellyBean]

oh no, that's so sad. Looks like David letterman will have to start writing all of his jokes.

sail on johnny

[Angel Beech]

I guess it's St. Peter's turn to say "Heeeeeerrrrre's Johnny"

Sail on, Johnny! Thanks for the laughs!

[GrannaC]

Nobody did late night better than Johnny Carson.

A true comedy genius . . . sail on, Johnny

[jollymon345]

Damn that really sucks. Just last week there were stories talking about him like nothing was wrong and then this.



Sail on Johnny!

[weirdo0521]

sail on, Johnny.

It is so sad-I remember him from his game show days (whom do you trust) and remember telling my parents about him and who he was when he was named host of the Tonight Show).

He will be missed so much.

You are really dating yourself..........

[HsvParrothead]

jus heard...............sad...........

funny dude


ha ha ha ha(ed mcmahon)

YES... you are correct sir... (ed mcmahon)

SAIL ON JOHNNY !!!!!!!

another memory from my childhood slips away with the gulf stream of life...

[ejr]

sail on, Johnny.

It is so sad-I remember him from his game show days (whom do you trust) and remember telling my parents about him and who he was when he was named host of the Tonight Show).

He will be missed so much.

You are really dating yourself..........

yeah, I am, but isn't that illegal?

[PHBeerman]

Sail on!!! A man from the the state where all the greats come from.

[weirdo0521]

sail on, Johnny.

It is so sad-I remember him from his game show days (whom do you trust) and remember telling my parents about him and who he was when he was named host of the Tonight Show).

He will be missed so much.

You are really dating yourself..........

yeah, I am, but isn't that illegal?

Only in some states.........

[BottleofRum]

Long Live the King

"For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off."
-- Johnny Carson

[Jahfin]

'Tonight' And Forever
Johnny Carson, the Late-Night Host Whose Best Act Was Himself

By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer

We've had 13 years to get over saying a painful goodbye to Johnny Carson.

Now we have to start all over again. Even though he stayed almost
completely out of the public eye since stepping down as host of "The Tonight
Show," this time the pain is much worse.

There is absolutely no chance Johnny will come back now, even for an
instant. Early Sunday morning, the great comedy star, who became known as
"the king of late night" for his amazing longevity and class, died, at 79, of
emphysema. On his last show, he expressed sorrow that his son Rick, victim
of a car crash, couldn't be there with the rest of his family to make it a
"perfect
evening."

"But I guess life does what it's supposed to do," he said, "and you accept it
and move on."

Still, it's awfully hard to accept the loss of a man who was like a next-door
neighbor to 20 million people, dropping by to end the day with a few laughs,
even when there seemed so little in the world to laugh about, always
agreeable and always at his most ingratiating. Johnny Carson always
managed to find something to amuse us, usually something deflating the
pompous and the self-important -- two faults of which he was never guilty
himself.

"And so it has come to this," he told us on his last "Tonight" show ever. "I am
one of the lucky people in the world. I found something that I always wanted
to do and I have enjoyed every single minute of it." That speaks to part of
what made Carson so magnetic and infectious, what made him such a
pleasure to have in the house: We didn't watch the show, we watched him,
and in addition to being entertained by him, we enjoyed watching him be
entertained by others.

His delight at the discovery of some newfound comic talent -- he and his staff
probably discovered more of that than anyone else in the history of show
business -- was palpable; he'd laugh so hard that his chair would almost roll
out from under him. When Bette Midler sang a farewell "One for My Baby" to
him on the penultimate show, a camera caught Midler in the foreground
singing and Johnny in the background sniffing tearfully, and we felt not like
intruders on a private moment but like close friends who'd been invited to
share it.

Carson has been called an Everyman figure, but that would be fitting only if
every man were hilarious. He not only had brilliant timing and a
lightning-quick mind for ad libs, he had a unique talent for turning bum jokes
into gold. If a punch line elicited silence or groans from the studio audience,
Carson would make a funny crack about how bad the joke was, or pull down
the overhead microphone and say into it, "Attention Kmart shoppers" or, in
the darkest hours, break into a soft-shoe dance with Doc Severinsen leading
the band in "Tea for Two."

Ed McMahon, Carson's longtime announcer, seemed to laugh with particular
gusto at these demonstrations of desperation. Sometimes Carson grew
philosophical about the strange enjoyment people got from the clunkers and
from seeing him squirm.

"It's like I'm up on a ledge and the crowd below is yelling, 'Jump! Jump!' " he
said.

"He was the best," David Letterman declared in a statement yesterday from
St. Bart's, where he and his family are vacationing. He called Carson "a star
and a gentleman" and said there wasn't a night when he didn't ask himself
how "Johnny" would have done something.

Peter Lassally, a close friend of Carson's who'd joined the show as a
producer in 1970, was shocked and despondent at Carson's death, especially
since Carson had been having such a joyful retirement. "After he left the
show, he became so much more open and gentle," Lassally recalled from his
home in Malibu. "He was so much sweeter and relaxed, and it was so much
fun to be with him."

Speaking often by phone in addition to sharing occasional nights out, Lassally
said, he and Carson would "talk about how terrible the world situation was --
politics, books, things in the news. He was always interested in the world
outside of show business. He would also call when he was watching a really
bad television show, especially something live, and he'd ask if I was watching
it too. If I wasn't, I'd turn it on, and we'd laugh hysterically just at how bad
it
was. He never failed to call when something was really, really awful."

Carson didn't miss doing "The Tonight Show," but he may have missed doing
the monologue. It was Lassally who revealed just last week that Carson would
occasionally write a joke about some item in the news and send it off to
Letterman, and that those jokes would sometimes end up in Letterman's
monologue. He'd been doing this for more than a year, Lassally said
yesterday. Carson found Letterman "strange" but always liked him and would
have preferred that Letterman, not Jay Leno, succeed him at the "Tonight
Show" desk.

Lassally revealed the secret about the jokes because he was trying to get
inquiring TV columnists off the topic of Carson's health, not wanting to discuss

it any more than necessary. The National Enquirer had splashed a story
about Carson being rushed to the hospital on its front page, and the tabloid is
usually accurate when dealing with stories of celebrity illness. Lassally hadn't

heard from Carson for three weeks, he said yesterday, and Carson's voice
hadn't sounded very healthy on the phone -- high-pitched and raspy.

Carson was a heavy smoker for years, and when he started as "Tonight"
host, with the show still originating from NBC Studios in New York, smoke was
always wafting up from an ashtray on his desk. He eventually tried to avoid
taking puffs while on camera, and -- chided by such guests as Tony Randall
-- finally gave up smoking altogether. But permanent damage may have been
done.

Hundreds and hundreds of guests passed through "The Tonight Show"
talking to Johnny over those 30 years, most of them plugging movies or TV
shows or books. Carson made it all entertaining with his sharp wit and
self-deprecating humor. There were also regular scripted comedy segments
in which Carson would wear a costume and play a wacky character, a kind of
throwback to the vaudeville era and to showbiz as Carson -- though hardly
any of today's stars -- remembered it.

He would don a wig and dress and be irreverent "Aunt Blabby," a character
with more than a passing resemblance to Jonathan Winters as "Maude
Frickert." When Carl Sagan was a popular figure, Carson -- an astronomy
buff himself -- would do a dead-on Sagan impression, always talking about
"billions and billions" of these or those in the solar system. To deliver the
news of the future, Carson would turn himself into "Zontar Rather," and to
divine questions without ever having seen the answers (because, as straight
man McMahon explained, they had been kept in "a mayonnaise jar on Funk &
Wagnalls' porch since noon today"), Carson plopped a turban on his head
and became "Carnac the Magnificent."

Answer: Sis boom bah. Question: What is the sound of a sheep exploding?

These and other bits -- Art Fern, the hammy commercial pitchman who kept
interrupting the afternoon movie on an unnamed local TV station -- usually
followed the monologue, which was the jewel in the turban for the show.
Carson's best interviews, meanwhile, were not necessarily with movie or TV
stars so much as the ones he did with small children and very old people,
whom Carson always seemed to find awesome.

Kids were great because they weren't intimidated by cameras and lights. Little
Zachary La Voy, a fledgling actor, kept peeking at himself in a monitor during
a 1989 show now available on home video. Carson: "How do you think you
look?" Little boy: "Cute!" Carson erupted in laughter.

He also very dependably got laughs from segments featuring wild animals
brought to the studio by zoologists and other experts. Once when a leopard in
a cage suddenly growled and swiped at Carson, Carson ran all the way
across the studio floor and jumped into the arms of McMahon.

The show was almost always a joy to watch because Carson almost always
took great joy in doing it.

Carson turned down all entreaties -- and there were dozens -- to come out of
retirement for one show, one little sketch, one brief appearance. Except for a
tiny appearance on Letterman's CBS show, Carson stayed away. During a
1993 interview, he revealed one of the main reasons for remaining out of the
public eye: Bob Hope. Carson thought Hope seemed sad continuing to make
appearances on television, even if only to stand up and wave, as he waded
further and further into his nineties and grew increasingly infirm. Carson did
not want to look pathetic, nor come across as someone who refused to leave
the stage even though the hour had clearly come.

The tabloids occasionally printed sneaky photographs of Carson on his boat
or walking in Malibu and appearing to be less trim and buoyant than he
always was on "The Tonight Show." But for the most part, the prevailing
image that Carson left us was of a man still full of vitality, mischief,
irreverence and incomparable charm -- a man who still seemed boyish even
as he crossed the boundary into his seventies.

"I hope when I find something I want to do and think you would like, I can
come back," Carson said in his final remarks that last night. Faithful fans
knew he was bluffing even then, and that it was unlikely he would ever return.
Now it is official, though his image will always be available through one form
of electronic legerdemain or another.

It can never be the same as when the multicolored curtains parted, the band
played Johnny's theme (which he wrote with Paul Anka) and McMahon did his
trademark "Heeeeeere's Johnny."

His death received almost marathon coverage on some of the news channels
yesterday as though he had been a head of state. In a way, he was. New
comedians couldn't really be popular until Carson had officially christened
them with appearances on his show -- perhaps even including a few
accolades from the master himself, or an invitation to sit down and chat on
the couch.

When an especially celebrated person dies, it is often called the end of an
era. But Johnny Carson's era didn't end yesterday; it ended many years
earlier. One way or another, it's gone.

And yet there are times when you are watching a movie made in the past
three decades and you hear a Carson show or his familiar theme music in the
background, and suddenly you perk up, do a double take, and think maybe
he never left and he'll be on again tonight after all.

When he left, Johnny said he would like to relive all 30 years over again. If
only we could. If only we could.

[Pencil Thin (inactive)]

Sail on Johnny! You'll be missed by all. Thanks for all the side splitting laughter over the years!

[nycparrothead]

He was actually on the news about something the other day...

Yeah, there was just a big thing saying that once in a while, some of the jokes that Letterman uses in his monologue come directly from Johnny... Quite an honor for Letterman I'd say!

Sail on Johnny, you'll be missed...

[Lightning Bolt]

As David Letterman said best....
"After Johnny, the rest of us are merely pretenders."

Sail on, Johnny

"I'll be seeing you....in all the old familiar places..."

[TheSecretsInTheCrust]

All the Letterman's, Leno's, Kimmel's and O'Brien's do not add up to one Johnny! Sail on my long friend of late night TV

[Cubbie Bear]

Johnny once said, "If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead." I was just thinking about you and how that applies. I've missed you since you left and I feel a void today. Sail On Johnny

[BilltheLizard]

Sail On Johnny.

Thanks for laughs and the warmth.

[Tiki Bar]

sail on, Johnny.

It is so sad-I remember him from his game show days (whom do you trust) and remember telling my parents about him and who he was when he was named host of the Tonight Show).

He will be missed so much.

You are really dating yourself..........

yeah, I am, but isn't that illegal?

:ahem: Sail on Johnny! Thanks for the memories!

[springparrot]

Thank you for all the smiles, Johnny.

[phenwayparrothead]

sail on