This evening’s main attraction is Don (The Enforcer) Rickles, not so much the court jester of TV as the court hit man. Carson can cope superbly with garrulous guests who tell interminable stories (whether ponderously, owing to drink or downers, or manically, owing to uppers or illicit inhalations). Instead of quickly changing the subject, as many hosts would, he slaughters the offenders with pure politesse. Often, he will give them enough rope to hang themselves, allowing them to ramble on while he affects attentive interest. Now and then, however, he will let the camera catch him in the act of half-stifling a yawn, or raising a baffled eyebrow, or aiming straight at the lens a stare of frozen, I-think-I-am-going-mad incredulity. He prevents us from being bored by making his own boredom funny—a daring feat of comic one-upmanship. The way in which he uses the camera as a silent conspirator is probably Carson’s most original contribution to TV technique. There is a lens permanently trained on him alone—a private pipeline through which he transmits visual asides directly to the viewer, who thus becomes his flattered accomplice. Once, talking to me on a somewhat tattered theme, the difference between stage and screen acting, Paul Newman made a remark that seemed obvious at the time but grows in wisdom the more I ponder it. “On the stage, you have to seek the focus of the audience,” he said. “In movies, it’s given to you by the camera.” Among the marks of a star on television, as in the cinema, is his or her ability to grasp this truth and act on it. Seek, and you shall not find; grab, and it shall not be given unto you. Carson learned these rules early and is now their master practitioner.

Even the best-planned talk shows, however, run into doldrums; e.g., the guest who suffers from incontinent sycophancy, or whose third marriage has brought into his life a new sense of wonder plus three gratingly cute anecdotes about the joys of paternity, or who is a British comedian on his first, tongue-tied trip to the States, or whose conversational range is confined to plugging an upcoming appearance at Lake Tahoe. On such occasions, the ideal solution is: Bring on Rickles, king of icebreakers, whose chosen weapon is the verbal hand grenade. Rickles is an unrivalled catalyst (though I can already hear him roaring, “What do you mean, I’m a catalyst? I’m a Jew!”). Squatly built, rather less bald than Mussolini, his bulbous face running the gamut from jovial contempt to outright nausea, he looks like an extra in a crowd scene by Hieronymus Bosch. No one is immune from his misanthropy; he exudes his venom at host and guests alike. In a medium ruled by the censorious Superego, Rickles is the unchained Id. At his best, he breaks through the bad-taste barrier into a world of sheer outrage where no forbidden thought goes unspoken and where everything spoken is anarchically liberating. More deftly than anyone else, Carson knows how to play matador to Rickles’ bull, inciting him to charge, and sometimes getting gored himself. At one point during this program, Rickles interrupts a question from Carson with an authentic conversation-stopper. “Your left eye is dancing!” he bellows, leaning forward and pointing a stubby finger. “That means you’re self-conscious. Ever since you stopped drinking, your left eye dances.” Even Carson is momentarily silenced. (I did not fully understand why until, at a subsequent meeting, Carson told me that there was one symptom by which he could infallibly recognize a guest who was on the brink of collapse, whether from fear, stimulants, or physical exhaustion. He called it “the dancing-eyeball syndrome.” A famous example from the early nineteen-sixties: Peter O’Toole appeared on the show after forty-eight sleepless hours, spent filming and flying, and could not utter a coherent sentence. Carson ushered him offstage during the first commercial. “The moment he sat down, I could see his eyeballs were twitching,” Carson said to me. “I recognized the syndrome at once. He was going to bomb.”)

Testimony of a Carson colleague:

My witness is Pat McCormick, who has been supplying Carson with material on and off for eighteen years and was a staff writer on the show from 1972 to 1977. Regarded as one of the most inventive gagmen in the business, he has also worked for Red Skelton, Danny Kaye, and others of note. McCormick, at forty-seven, is a burly, diffident man with hair of many colors: a reddish thatch on top, a gray mustache, and patches of various intermediate tints sprouting elsewhere on his head and face. Suitably resprayed, he might resemble a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and Zero Mostel. I have it on Ed McMahon’s authority that McCormick takes the occasional drink, and that he once turned up at a script conference declaring, “I have lost my car, but I have tire marks on my hands.” He gives me his account of a typical day on the “Tonight Show.” “The writers—there are usually five of us—arrive at the studio around 9:30 A.M.,” he says. “We’ve read the morning papers and the latest magazines. Once a week, we all get together for an ideas meeting, but most days we work separately, starting out with the monologue. I tend to specialize in fairly weird, uninhibited stuff. Johnny enjoys that kind of thing, and I just let it pour out. Like a line I came up with not long ago: ‘If you want to clear your system out, sit on a piece of cheese and swallow a mouse.’ Johnny finds his own ways of handling bum gags. When he’s in a bad situation, I always wonder how the hell he’ll get out of it, and he always surprises me.”

Always? I remind McCormick of an occasion two days earlier, when a series of jokes had died like flies, and Carson had got a situation-saving laugh by remarking, “I now believe in reincarnation. Tonight’s monologue is going to come back as a dog.” That sounded to me like echt McCormick.

With a blush matching some of his hair, he admits to authorship of the line. He continues, “All the monologue material has to be on Johnny’s desk by three o’clock. He makes the final selection himself. One of his rules is: Never tell three jokes running on the same subject. And, of course, he adds ideas of his own. He’s a darned good comedy writer, you know.”

One sometimes detects a vindictive glint in Carson’s eye when a number of gags sink without risible trace, but McCormick assures me that this is all part of the act and causes no outbreaks of cold sweat among the writing team. “After the monologue,” he goes on, “we work on the desk spot with Ed McMahon, which comes next in the show, or on sketches that need polishing, or on material for one of Johnny’s characters.”

Accustomed to thinking of Carson the host, we forget the range of Carson the actor-comedian. His current incarnations include the talkative crone Aunt Blabby (Whistler’s mother on speed); the bungling turbanned clairvoyant named Carnac the Magnificent; Art Fern, described by McCormick as “the matinee-movie m.c. with patent-leather hair who’ll sell anything;” and—a newer acquisition—Floyd Turbo, the man in the red shirt who speaks for the silent majority, rebutting liberal editorials with a vehemence perceptibly impaired by his inability to read from a TelePrompTer at more than dictation speed. Fans will recall Turbo’s halting diatribe against the anti-gun lobby: “If God didn’t want man to hunt, he wouldn’t have given us plaid shirts. . . . I only kill in self-defense. What would you do if a rabbit pulled a knife on you? . . . Always remember: you can get more with a smile and a gun than you can with just a smile.”

“Thank you, gentlemen. Although I’m resigning from this board, my thoughts will be with you. I intend to spend much of my time relaxing and painting, and my work will be shown at the Forbush Gallery, East Sixty-eigth Street, just off Park.” Facebook

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Everything for the evening’s show must be rehearsed and ready for taping by five-thirty, apart from the central, imponderable element, on which all else depends: Carson’s handling of the guests. Briefed by his aides, he knows the visitors’ backgrounds, recent achievements, and immediate plans, and during the commercials he will listen to tactical suggestions from confreres like Fred de Cordova; but when the tape is running, he is the field commander, and his intuitions dictate the course of events. As he awaits his entrance cue, he is entitled to reflect, like Henry V on a more earthshaking occasion, “The day, my friends, and all things stay for me.” McCormick, who now and then appears as a guest on the show, has this to say of Carson the interviewer: “He leans right in and goes with you, instead of leaning back and worrying about what the viewers are thinking. He never patronizes you or shows off at your expense. If you’re getting a few pockets of laughter from the studio audience, he’ll encourage you and feed you. He’s an ideal straight man as well as a first-rate comedian, and that’s a unique combination. Above all, there’s a strand of his personality that is quite wild. He can do good bread-and-butter comedy any day of the week—like his Vegas routines or his banquet speeches—but he has this crazy streak that keeps coming through on the show, and when it does it’s infectious. You feel anything could happen.”