In 1993, some very dumb Fox executives had a very very dumb idea: Let’s give an over-the-hill hack comedian his own late-night talk show! And let’s do it right at the peak of the talk show wars, when the competition will be even fiercer than usual!

The stink bomb that was The Chevy Chase Show first wafted over the airwaves on September 7, 1993, a week after David Letterman’s CBS debut and a week before Conan O’Brien took over as the host of Late Night. If you blinked—or if you were rubbing your eyes because you couldn’t quite believe the awfulness of what you were seeing—then you missed it: The show was cancelled after only five weeks. The end came when the show was ambushed by a Murdoch-funded black-ops team whose members hung Chase upside down from a par can before riddling his sad, humor-free body with automatic weapons. As the stagehands were mopping the blood off the floor and picking up all the tiny bits of Chase’s flesh and brain matter, I turned to my companion and said, “This is the only funny thing that has ever happened on this show.” I was almost sorry to see him go.

I watched The Chevy Chase Show that first night, and the scar on my chin is still healing. Everything about the show screamed “Unprepared! Unwise! Uncomfortable!” Chase was unprepared, the producers were unprepared, the writers were unprepared. Chase twitched so much that he almost transformed himself from a solid into a gas. The four-minute clip below contains part of Chase’s interview with the show’s first-ever guest, Goldie Hawn, as well as their truly unfortunate attempts to get the audience dancing—to “La Bamba”—as the show went to commercial break. Sandwiched in between is a humiliating episode involving a birthday cake and Hawn’s then-adolescent son, Oliver Hudson, who was sitting in the front row of the audience. Notice that Chase can’t even be bothered to put his heart into the obviously planned pratfall with the cake.

(This clip is from one of my Media Shower tapes.)

[UPDATE: In July 2007, I posted another clip from the debut episode.]

See this page for a related 1998 story from The Onion.

In 1990, a year or two before he became super-famous, Rush Limbaugh guest-hosted Pat Sajak’s short-lived talk show. It didn’t go so well: The taping was disrupted by a group of angry activists who were seated throughout the audience. A visibly rattled Limbaugh was unable to regain control of the show. “He came out full of bluster and left a very shaken man,” a CBS executive later said. “I had never seen a man sweat as much in my life.” Eventually Limbaugh made it to the first commercial break, and then, barely, to the next one; when the show returned from the second break, the activists were gone—along with the rest of the audience. A demoralized Limbaugh then delivered self-serving closing remarks to an empty studio.

This is from one of my Media Shower tapes (hence the phone number and other graphics that are occasionally superimposed over the video). Yesterday I figured out how to embed a YouTube video on a web page, which will allow me to put up stuff like this without worrying about bandwidth. You’ll need the Flash plugin. The clip is about 11 minutes long, and it’s fricking awesome.

This grainy amateur footage of half a dozen young drunkards is one of my favorite underground video clips ever. It’s bloody, it’s patriotic, it’s a disturbing window into the existentialist mindset of America’s intellectual underclass. The clip, which is probably about ten years old, captures a group of bored nonvaledictorians as they conduct experiments regarding the breakability of beer bottles when smashed against the human head. The footage is mesmerizing for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the sounds on the audio track: the triumphant yelps, the mournful howls, the shattering of glass, the dull thud of intact beer bottles caroming off of empty human heads.

As usual, this is from one of my Media Shower tapes. When Jamie Greenberg, Media Shower’s host, introduced this clip on his (now defunct) show four or five years ago, he described it as “kind of Blair Witch meets Animal House, with a touch of the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter thrown in.” I can’t imagine a more apt description than that.

(If you’d like to link to this, please link to this post and not to the file itself. Thanks!)

These guys are numbskulls.

This two-minute video curiosity is sophomoric and mean, but it’s also pretty entertaining. In December 1993, Michael Jackson videotaped an anguished public statement addressing the disturbing allegations that were then starting to swirl around him. At some point afterward, someone with access to video editing equipment twisted Jackson’s bizarre statement into an even more bizarre exercise in self-incrimination and self-abasement.

I have no idea who made this or when it was made. As usual, it’s from one of my Media Shower tapes.

(If you want to link to this, please link to this post, not to the file itself. Thanks!)

Another underground video gem from one of my Media Shower tapes. This one-and-a-half-minute clip was apparently filmed at a small club in Oklahoma. A redneck with an acoustic guitar has lost control of his audience, which is heckling him mercilessly. The agitated guitarist heckles back. One of the hecklers apparently gets up and makes a move toward the stage—and the guitarist steps down and goes all El Kabong on the guy. You don’t really see anyone but the guitarist during the clip—the camera never moves, and the violence takes place just out of camera range. But somehow that makes it funnier: The guitarist lunges out of view with an intact guitar; there’s a big THUNK; and then he steps back onstage with a broken guitar. He pleads with the audience to take his side, but the stunned crowd isn’t having any of it. Someone suggests calling security. And then the perfect kicker: Someone yells, “I want my money back!”

I’ve seen this clip dozens of times over the last few years, and it still makes me laugh and laugh every single time.

[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.]

[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.

[Continue reading "Two Johnny Carson Clips You Won’t See on CNN This Week"...]