Panopticist: Two Johnny Carson Clips You Won’t See on CNN This Week

January 25, 2005

Two Johnny Carson Clips You Won’t See on CNN This Week

Posted by Andrew Hearst

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[Update, 2:25 p.m., February 1: The bandwidth for this video file is costing me a lot of money, so I’m going to have to take it down at the end of today, February 1. If you can host the file yourself, or you know a place where a 5-megabyte video file could be hosted at no cost, please let me know and I will link to it. Thanks, my apologies.]

[Also: Jamie Greenberg of Media Shower has posted a bunch of comments at the end of the comments thread.]

[Update, 11:55 p.m., February 1: Okay, I’ve taken the file down. Sorry…]

The six-minute video linked at the end of this post contains two compelling and somewhat disturbing Tonight Show clips from the mid-’70s. The video is from an episode of the superb Manhattan public-access program Media Shower, a clip show that was on the air from 1997 until 2000. The Tonight Show clips are introduced by Media Shower’s host and creator, Jamie Greenberg, a New York comedy writer and performer.

What’s special about these two clips? Well, let’s just say that they wouldn’t win Johnny Carson any racial sensitivity awards. At the very least, they show that Carson was capable of egregious lapses in judgment. I don’t have any reason to think these clips reveal something dark about Carson himself, but they do reveal a lot about the sort of race-oriented humor that was acceptable on television even in the late 1970s.

In the first clip, an apparently unscripted incident from 1977, a mock-angry Carson gets up from his desk and walks down the hall to confront Don Rickles, who is taping an episode of the sitcom C.P.O. Sharkey in an adjacent studio. After a few seconds, Carson points at a black cast member and shouts, “Hey, a black man! Yo, black man! How’s it goin’ there, daddy?” Carson walks over to the actor and gives him five. And then he walks back over to Rickles and says something incredibly shocking. You may not catch it the first time, but Jamie comes on after the clips and explains what to listen for, and then he shows that part of the clip again.

Hey! A black man!

The second clip is from 1976 and features a jive-talking Carson in blackface—or, to be more accurate, half-blackface. Johnny Carson! In blackface! In 1976! As Jamie says in his setup, “Kind of shocking that this was still airing in 1976 on The Tonight Show.”

Hey dere, mamma!

You can learn more about Media Shower in this piece I wrote for The Village Voice in 2000. The very rudimentary Media Shower website is, much to my surprise, still online, four years after the show went off the air. Jamie Greenberg’s email address is on that site, in case you’d like to reach him.

Thanks to Daniel Radosh for nudging me to get this video online. Here is Daniel’s take on these clips.

Here’s the video in Quicktime format.

Update: Lots of commentary about this on Metafilter.

Update II, Wednesday afternoon: Apparently Don Rickles was on The Tonight Show with Leno this past Monday evening, and Rickles showed the beginning of the C.P.O. Sharkey clip—but they stopped it before the shenanigans with the black actor.

Also: The black actor is apparently Peter Isacksen. This may reveal too much about my love of all things ’70s, but it filled me with glee to discover that Isacksen played a character called Driftwood in The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, a gloriously bad movie that is perhaps the apotheosis of disco-era cheese. Oops: The actor is apparently Harrison Page, not Peter Isacksen. (Thanks to Zal in the comments for the correction.) Page has been doing a lot of episodic TV work in recent years, notably JAG, E.R., and Ally McBeal.

Update III, Saturday morning: The bottom line here, folks, is that the one truly disturbing moment in these two clips is the moment Carson says the two words that Jamie, I, and lots of other people believe he says. If you don’t believe Carson says those two words—and I’m not sure why various commenters are so quick to believe he doesn’t say them—then yes, these clips are mainly interesting as “time-capsule relics,” to use Jamie’s words. Am I positive that Carson says those two words? No, I’m not. But I’m about as close to positive as I can be. (I didn’t realize there was going to be this weird Zapruder aspect to the whole thing.) Even in the context of impromptu Rickles-style insult humor, hearing the universally beloved Johnny Carson say those two words about a black man is just totally shocking. Do those two words indicate that Carson was some sort of closet racist? OF COURSE THEY DON’T. The reason Jamie originally broadcast these clips, and the reason I posted them, is because they present a picture of Johnny Carson that is somewhat at odds with his genial, inoffensive public persona. (Remember, also, that Jamie gives a separate reason for why he’s showing the C.P.O. Sharkey clip: the fact that Rickles is caught so flatfooted in it.) If you came to this site expecting to see a deranged Johnny Carson screaming the N-word and pummeling a black person, well, of course you’re going to be disappointed.