“Like music.”
Bill Carter, writing in The War for Late Night about the years during which Johnny Carson secretly wrote jokes for Letterman:
The separation from the show that had been his life and utter preoccupation for thirty years had proved jarring for Carson. Friends reported that it had taken at least six months after he stepped down before Johnny could have a normal day — one in which he didn’t feel the withdrawal pangs. Even after he settled in to his postshow life, however, Carson could not turn off the trenchant comic instincts honed over a lifetime. He would read the paper in the morning, watch the news, hear about some zany event taking place somewhere, and the joke would simply come to him, like music. And what good is a perfectly crafted joke if you can’t tell it to someone?
… Johnny didn’t flood Dave with jokes, sending in only a few here and there whenever he felt they were worthy. Letterman could not help but be moved, but promised he would judge the material as he would that from any other writer. … This was Johnny Carson, silenced by retirement, still using his comic voice, with Dave as the mouthpiece. Dave didn’t want to reveal the secret, and Johnny certainly didn’t want to offend NBC by having it publicly known that he was writing for the guy competing with The Tonight Show. So only a few insiders knew the source of the jokes, and which ones were Johnny’s when they got on the air.
Johnny himself took to watching the show every night wondering if Dave would use one of his submissions. (And if he, did, yes, Johnny would be paid his seventy-five dollars.) Whenever Dave did, Johnny’s joy was infectious, and he would call Lassally and excitedly tell him, “Oh my gosh, I got a joke on the air last night. Dave told one of my jokes.”
Lassally could hear the pride in Carson’s voice. “He was like a kid in a candy store,” Lassally recalled.
I found this really moving. What’s so compelling about the sagas of late night television is that, despite being at the absolute height of their profession, these are men who show time and time again that they care more about their craft and their fellow performers than they do about the immense amounts of money at stake. And yes, that applies to Jay Leno too, despite all his myopia — when so much of media is corporate, pre-determined and bereft of surprise, late night hosts still remain human.
A week after Johnny’s death, Letterman opened a tribute show by doing a monologue composed entirely of jokes Carson wrote for him, followed by a lengthy and touching interview with Peter Lassally, Carson’s longtime producer. The entire episode is on YouTube, and well worth watching.
