Best of Tonight

Madonna has long been one of my idols, as she came from virtually nowhere and ended up marrying a prince. Much like Grace Kelly, only with a little more sex involved (although Madonna is a distant relative of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and Guy Ritchie is merely a film director, not a prince)…In this clip, Leno does a tongue-in-cheek interview with Madonna.

Question: What kind of music to you listen to?
Answer: Celine Dion, as she looks like Madonna’s cousin Loretta, and her father listens to Celine rather than to his own daughter.

Question: How about hobbies?
Answer: “I have a collection.” Leno: “Of what?” Madonna draws this out, and finally answers by pulling something out of her pocket - she collects barrettes. She got the ones she gave to Leno at a “barette auction” in Minnesota.

Question: What are you reading?
Answer: “I’m rereading Little Women.”

Question: Any acting plans?
Answer: “I’m thinking about going back to Broadway.” She wants to play the flying rug in Beauty and the Beast.

Madonna mentions that she’s started a group that rehabilitates rappers and basketball players. At that point you know she’s not serious, if this thought didn’t occur to you already…

In this monologue, Johnny introduces himself as a “supply-side” comedian, an economic joke that fell flat on the audience. Carson then brings up the Mr. Goodwrench commercials, where the guy in the red bow tie supplies consumers with the best service possible. Instead, he gets his car serviced by “Mr. Goodshaft.” Yes, Johnny is grabbing his ‘manhood’ as he makes this joke. The movement is slightly off camera, but definitely there.

Carson then introduces his show. He states that he had a really rough show the previous evening, and some clown yells out, “How rough was it?” Instead of laughing, said Carson, “they held up their green cards.”

According to Carson, this show was produced about a week before Walter Cronkite’s last appearance as a news anchor for The CBS Evening News. Cronkite served on this show for 19 years, and was known as “the most trusted man in America” because of his professional experience and demeanor. One of Cronkite’s trademarks was ending the CBS Evening News with the phrase, “…And that’s the way it is:”, followed by the date (keeping to standards of objective journalism, he omitted this phrase on nights when he ended the newscast with opinion or commentary).

Cronkite’s last day in the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News was on March 6, 1981 according to Wikipedia; he was succeeded the following Monday (the 9th) by Dan Rather. What’s so confusing about this is that Carson also references Van Gogh’s birthday. He states that Van Gogh was born on the day the show was produced, but Van Gogh was born on March 30. What’s the dealio?

This clip is from the first episode of the Tonight Show, produced in 1956. I was two years old. Were you even born yet?

Ok, it’s not an April Fool’s joke, but it’s funny. Steve Martin performs on the Tonight Show as the Great Flydini. This is the skit where various object emerge from Martin’s crotch such as eggs, a cigarette, and a phone…all sexual symbols. Then an unknown actress makes an appearance, and Steve’s crotch emits a stuffed animal and a drink for her.

Martin’s comedy always has had a cutting edge to it, a sophistication that comes from his experiences and education (he was a philosophy major at California State University, Long Beach). He stated in Rolling Stone (1982) that:

College totally changed my life. It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about non sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, “Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!” Then it gets real easy to write this stuff, because all you have to do is twist everything hard - you twist the punch line, you twist the non sequitur so hard away from the things that set I up, that it’s easy… and it’s thrilling.”

The year this skit was performed is unkown…