Communication Currents

New Series, Vol. 1, No. 12

The Tonight Show, a late night comedy and interview program on the NBC network, was launched in 1954 and has been broadcast continuously since then, with the current host being Jimmy Fallon (since 2014). Fallon is the sixth permanent host, but the one most closely associated with The Tonight Show has been Johnny Carson, who hosted the program from 1962 to 1992. During this period and for years afterward, Carson was one of the most famous people in the United States other than presidents, probably as famous during his first 10 years as singer Elvis Presley, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., or singer/actress Barbara Streisand and as famous his last 10 years as singer Michael Jackson, basketball star Michael Jordan or actor Harrison Ford. Carson and his show were, to use an appropriate cliché, an American institution. As scholar White puts it, “At the height of Carson’s success in the 1970s, The Tonight Show drew ten million viewers nightly; set records for late night advertising revenues ($200 million annually); accounted for 17% of NBC’s network profits; and dominated light-night TV programming.”

A standard part of Carson’s program, and most other similar television programs, was the “monologue,” several minutes of jokes, comments and anecdotes at the beginning of each show. Christopher F. White’s article analyzes 270 monologues (8-12 minutes each) during the 1984-92 period; each one contained 12-20 jokes, at least 10 of which referred to a famous person and White studied only jokes about celebrities. He concludes that Carson’s monologues “established and sustained a national forum with unparalleled reach and cultural purchase that made available a distinct ‘way of knowing’ by which loyal viewers could imaginatively maintain, repair, and transform aspects of their personal and collective experience” [citations omitted].

White asserts first that Carson functioned as both a “toastmaster” and a “hipster-skeptic” who was a “champion of the people.” (This perhaps came naturally to Carson, who was born in Corning, Iowa [current pop. about 1,500] and grew up in Norfolk, Nebraska [current pop. about 25,000]; that Carson was from a typical family in Nebraska was well known to his audiences.)

White’s article briefly discusses the cultural roles of celebrities, particularly in “market-based democracies with rapid news cycles.” Carson’s “writers’ room” staff scanned news reports, historical sources, and related materials for joke material, and they kept a cross-indexed database of such facts. Carson only accepted, rejected, and/or reordered his writers’ jokes. Then, according to White, “Legal Affairs [staff] reviewed scripts for potential libel, Compliance & Practices [staff] applied FCC [Federal Communications Commission] regulations to issues of political partisanship; and Standards & Practices [staff] screened references to sex, drugs, and religion.”

Although theorists have defined and divided “Celebrity-Signifiers” in many different ways, White assumed that Carson’s writers chose celebrities, and what to say about them, with a preferred reading in mind—in other words, an intent and assumption about how most of the audience would interpret a particular joke about a particular person. White classified celebrities in Carson’s monologues into four groups: Abiding Ones, Social Types, Shooting Stars, and Politicos. Abiding Ones were figures famous for a long time, whether living or dead, real or fictional. Examples were Amelia Earhart, John Wilkes Booth, and Mickey Mouse. Social types were figures identified with clearly defined character traits, such as “libertine” Madonna, right-wing writer William F. Buckley Jr., and the “wimp” Deputy Barney Fife character from the Andy Griffith Show. Shooting Stars were suddenly and/or temporarily famous people, such as boxer Mike Tyson, media mogul Ted Turner when he colorized classic Hollywood films, and Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos and her endless shoes. Politicos were political figures worldwide, such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela or Ronald Reagan.

In terms of joke themes, Carson’s writers tied celebrities to dates and/or achievements, used “put-down” humor, gave context to news events, drew out sagas (jokes over many days or weeks about major events such as the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident or the 1986-87 Iran-Contra scandal), and noted celebrities “excessive” behavior or characteristics. While late night television had more freedom than prime time, they avoided hot button topics such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the deadly Union Carbide leak in Bhopal (India), the Lebanese civil war, and the United Kingdom agreeing to give Hong Kong back to China, among others. Such topics could offend viewers and alienate advertisers.

White briefly notes various theories of comedy in modern society, but how or why audiences did (or did not) find individual jokes funny is beyond the study’s scope. Instead, White finds useful Thornburn’s 1987 formulation of “‘deeply collaborative enterprises’ in the form of consensus narratives” that can address national audiences and “articulate, in widely accessible language, an inheritance of shared plots, character types, and narrative conventions.” White writes that Carson “held a funhouse mirror up to the vagaries of American experience” for his millions of viewers to see and the monologues “afforded regular viewers the opportunity to hone social competencies (recognition, recollection, skepticism, attribution, etc.), mull over a limited range of cultural histories and personal value systems, and ridicule political machinations in rehearsal for their daylight lives.”

White concludes by pointing out that, decades later, scholars can also study the influences of Carson’s monologues on his Tonight Show successors, other late-night shows, and “TV sitcoms, TV dramas and cable TV commentators.”

Communication Currents Discussion Questions

1. Historian Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in 1962 that a celebrity is a “person who is well-known for his well-knownness,” which later writers called “famous for being famous.” Since some Carson jokes were about such figures, and many other jokes were about famous people who fit into two or more of White’s four celebrity groups (Abiding Ones, Social Types, Shooting Stars, and Politicos), discuss those groupings and the practice of grouping celebrities generally. 
2. White writes that the Carson monologues “promoted and undermined conventional wisdoms, celebrated and subverted shared experience, and derided political machinations.” Who are your favorite late-night TV hosts and why? Do they fulfill any functions that Carson monologues did and if so, how?  
3. Carson’s monologues obviously overwhelmingly focused on celebrities in the news. But not everyone follows the news and not everyone is interested in celebrities. Are there other approaches to attracting and maintaining a large, diverse and national audience for a late night comedy/interview program?

For additional suggestions about how to use this and other Communication Currents in the classroom, see: https://www.natcom.org/publications/communication-currents/integrating-communication-currents-classroom

(https://www.natcom.org/publications/communication-currents/integrating-communication-currents-classroom)

Christopher R. White was an associate professor, Department of Mass Communication, Sam Houston State University.

This essay, by Dane S. Claussen, translates the scholarly journal article, Christopher F. White (2024). The Johnny Carson monologues 1984-1992 consensus narrative and the Lingua Franca of celebrity, Critical Studies in Media Communication 41(2), 121-136. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2024.2342367