Thinking of a couple of outstanding comedians today. Michael McKean, currently plugging the 2025 Spinal Tap movie along with Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest and Rob Reiner, celebrates his 78th birthday today.
First and foremost, there's something about the very earnest cover of the Rolling Stones' Start Me Up by The Folksmen that cracks me up.
The blog shall toast Michael and the superb comedy he has helped bring to a weary and stressed-out world over many decades, and also toast another outstanding comic born on this date in Quebec City, Norm MacDonald.
Here's a terrific interview and overview of Mr. McKean's lengthy showbiz career. Thanks a million for this, SAG AFTRA!
Michael McKean's episode of Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast is a must-listen.
In the "I did not know that" department, the IMDB entry for Michael McKean notes: In early 1967, he was briefly a member of the New York City "baroque pop" band The Left Banke and played on the "Ivy, Ivy" single.
First heard about Michael McKean via the early 1970's improv group The Credibility Gap, which also featured David L. Lander and Harry Shearer.
The erudite and talented San Francisco deejay John Gilliland hosted a Sunday night comedy show on what was back then a top AM radio station and did us listeners the favor of playing very funny sketches by The Credibility Gap. Did not know until decades later than John was, at KRLA, an early member of the improv troupe in the late 1960's.
Michael and David L. Lander found their way from The Credibility Gap to the Garry Marshall sitcom LaVerne & Shirley as goofballs Lenny & Squiggy. Their best bits were the songs of Lenny & The Squigtones, although the then-prominent laugh track often drowns them out.
Was never crazy about Laverne & Shirley, even as a fan of previous Garry Marshall series (The Odd Couple), since by that time Monty Python's Flying Circus reruns, Saturday Night Live and SCTV were on the air. Still kept an eye out for Mr. McKean's appearances on Saturday Night Live a few years later, when Dick Ebersol produced the show.
The following sketches featuring The Folksmen and Spinal Tap is from the 10th season of SNL, the last produced by Ebersol. Ever so briefly, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest were SNL cast members.
Love those clips of Spinal Tap's early years!
There's so much to draw from that we shall very likely be making additions and edits to this post all weekend. The Return Of Spinal Tap is required viewing.
And then there are the Christopher Guest feature films, in which Michael McKean is among a super-talented stock company, along with Catherine O' Hara, Eugene Levy, Jane Lynch, Fred Willard, Parker Posey, Jennifer Coolidge, Michael Hitchcock and John Michael Higgins.
To make the segue from Michael McKean to Norm MacDonald, here is Adam Sandler's song from the SNL 50 extravaganza. In the Sandman's nicely done hat tip to Saturday Night Live's casts and production crew which starts at 3:45, Michael and Norm are duly noted!
Devoted a lengthy post to Norm MacDonald, born October 17, 1959 at some length at the time of his untimely passing in 2021. Were there any clips not included in that post? Yes - this one.
If that isn't sufficient Norm, watch the following!
As Steve Allen was a pianist/composer/bandleader who doubled as a comedian, music was a key ingredient in The Tonight Show from the beginning. Calypso group Tiger Boy performs in the following 1956 Tonight Show, beginning at 21:03.
Don't find many complete shows from Steve Allen's Tonight Show tenure or those hosted by Ernie Kovacs on Archive.org, YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion. There MUST be musical interludes in the Kovacs episodes! Skitch Henderson led the NBC orchestra at that time and into the Jack Parr and Johnny Carson eras. Doc Severinson and Tommy Newsom followed. The big band was patterned on the ensembles led by Count Basie, Quincy Jones, and (later) Thad Jones & Mel Lewis.
Dizzy Gillespie had an excellent time playing his compositions with the Tonight Show band.
All that said, as much as the Tonight Show band exemplified the Atomic Mr. Basie approach, periodically Johnny had a musical guest on who was not from the big band tradition.
Numerous rock, soul, pop and jazz greats performed on David Letterman's NBC and CBS shows. This included the recently departed metal man Ozzy Osbourne & Black Sabbath.
Did the music represented on Letterman run the freakin' gamut? Yes.
Could this band back Keith Emerson and McCoy Tyner? Yes - watch this!
It is not particularly surprising that with The World's Most Dangerous Band took to jazz in a big way. Bassist Will Lee toured with one of our favorites from the jazz universe, Horace Silver.
No doubt, several of musical director Paul Shaffer's heroes got to be on the show.
A memorable spinoff from the NBC incarnation of Late Night With David Letterman involved frequent Letterman guest, session man supreme and Gil Evans Orchestra stalwart David Sanborn, along with Letterman Show bandmates, and would represent something approximating a gold standard in presenting music on late-night television. That was Sunday Night A.K.A. Michelob Presents Night Music. We'll never see its like again.
Can't post the entire series here in this post, so check out this playlist. Would buy a Blu-ray of the complete series, pretty much the last gasp of jazz music on American television (even in late night), if possible.
Am a bit disappointed not to find more clips from The Arsenio Hall Show, which brought quite a variety of music to TV during its late 1980's - early 1990's heydey.
Tend to associate Dick Cavett's late-night program more with rock music than jazz, but, what do you know, here's Buddy Rich, frequent guest of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, bringing that big band sound to The Dick Cavett Show.
In closing, am not quite sure this fits into the late night theme, as Dick Cavett had moved out of the 11:30 p.m. Tonight Show time slot fairly early in his TV career. In any case, this must be one of the earliest instances of David Bowie on American television and precedes his 1979 appearance on Saturday Night Live.
Mr. Cavett did a good job interviewing Miles Davis here. If the guests on his late night and subsequent PBS shows were any indication, Dick Cavett was an enthusiastic aficionado of jazz and rock music.
As expected, could barely scratch the surface of this topic, the mighty music of late night TV, in this post!
Happy to offer a little taste of the goodness that was available on the ol' boob tube way back when. While the comedians were big time heroes of late night TV, so were the incredible musicians who created these beautiful sounds!
In the oddest of odd coincidences, our comedy-centric beat recently has been focused on late night TV - and behold, big time changes are underway in that world.
The latest and not greatest is that Stephen Colbert has been canned by the pathetic craven cowards and greedy bastards at CBS and Paramount. CBS' not so grand poobahs, very likely smarting over Colbert's criticism of the pending merger of Paramount Media and Skydance Global, will pull the plug on the show when the Late Show host's contract expires next May.
That said, as we stifle no small degree of anger, disgust, contempt and revulsion towards CBS, Paramount, Shari Redstone and the Ellisons (Larry and David), we continue our series Saluting The Heroes Of Late Night TV.
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was the biggest thing in showbiz, so big that The Beach Boys devoted a song to him. This ditty is as catchy as can be and even the nasal vocals of Mike Love are enjoyable! We at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog agree wholeheartedly with Brian Wilson's assessment, as Johnny was the coolest guy ever, especially in his 1960's and 1970's heydey as The King Of Late Night. Reportedly, Johnny HATED the song, but what the heck, it's our blog, so here it is.
There are innumerable extremely funny Carson clips, even with so many of the 1960's shows still missing - WAY too many Tonight Shows were taped over.
Herrrrrrrrre's Johnny, first with vocalist and actor (then on the Daniel Boone TV series), Ed Ames.
Can't believe I forgot all about Johnny's hilarious routine with Jack "Joe Friday" Webb from a 1968 Tonight Show. As Webb's radio shows (Pat Novak For Hire and Dragnet) and his guest star appearance on an episode of All Star Revue starring the wacky Ritz Brothers indicate, he possessed a wry sense of humor.
Do we miss the ridiculously talented Betty White, always flat-out hilarious on The Tonight Show with Johnny and other hosts? Yes. Did Betty ever get the opportunity to be a Tonight Show guest host? I don't know, but that would have been great.
Today we pay tribute to the many terrific stand-up comedians seen frequently on Carson and Letterman (note with the exception of Groucho, there weren't tons of comics on Dick Cavett's show, at least in his 1960's and early 1970's incarnation which aired between 10:00 p.m. and late night).
Johnny Carson's Tonight evolved into a showcase for stand-up comedians.
George Carlin, with Richard Pryor the best of the monologists, actually guest hosted The Tonight Show, as did Groucho Marx, Mort Sahl and Bob Newhart.
Johnny often featured his contemporaries in the standup world: Jackie Mason, Buddy Hackett, Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart and, especially, Rodney Dangerfield.
Richard Pryor, most trenchant of all stand-up philosophers, was a frequent guest on both the Carson and Letterman shows.
As was Stephen Wright.
One of the outstanding albeit lesser-known stand-up philosophers was the excellent Native American comedian and actor Charlie Hill, featured along with Robin Williams on The Richard Pryor Show.
Among the satirists seen on Late Night With David Letterman: Bill Hicks (1962-1994).
Sam Kinison, friend and cohort of Bill Hicks, brought his incendiary Pentecostal preacher persona and severe fallout from multiple bad marriages to the stand-up world.
In another galaxy of the stand-up comedy universe: Mitch Hedberg (1968-2005).
And then there was Norm, like Mitch Hedberg an original thinker with a singular view of the world.
Here, David Letterman pays tribute to his friend (and friend of all late-night TV shows) Robin Williams.
Robin cracked up Johnny and David and thus got dozens of appearances on their shows.
Here's the monologue that got Stephen Colbert, here sporting a mustache reminiscent of the octogenarian version of Groucho Marx, fired. Colbert is correct in his assessment that CBS' craven 16 million settlement of a frivolous lawsuit by Off-Brand Orbán was, indeed, a BIG FAT BRIBE.
Desperately hoping the merger will get FCC approval, CBS announced that the decision to cancel Late Night With Stephen Colbert is for "financial reasons." Even given that high-rated late night TV shows don't bring in anywhere near the dough-re-me they did in the past, ESPECIALLY during the 1960's heydey of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, to suggest that this decision is not at all politically motivated remains laughable.
The behavior of CBS/Paramount over the potential merger with Sundance (producers of dumb, lousy action flicks) and the pusillanimous actions of the cowards at Columbia University and the Paul Weiss law firm, alas, is par for the course these days.
And, yes, Your Correspondent makes this observation even after having listened to Keith Olbermann's extended excoriation of Colbert, the guy who followed David Letterman at the CBS Late Show franchise. It would be an understatement to suggest that Mr. Olbermann, both the most erudite and scathing of commentators, vehemently dislikes Mr. Colbert.
At CBS, 60 Minutes, the show the "don't you mess with me" likes of Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley and Harry Reasoner worked on, will be next to go.
That's because in 2025, plummeting television viewership and the related popularity of streaming with young viewers has dramatically reduced the potential for TV shows, including news-related programs which in the past were loss leaders for the networks, to make not just the big bucks but ANY bucks.
As far as the Paramount/CBS 16 million bribe by brazen, lily-livered and yellow-bellied appeasers of fascists is concerned, no doubt those pocket-lining Teapot Dome boys of 100+ years ago would say "geeeeees, Louise, can you guys tone down the sleazy corruption, graft and grift just a smidge?"
Rant over! In closing, thanks, readers, for your patience. After realizing that it appears to be the end of the road for the format which began with Steve Allen and hit its high water mark with Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett and David Letterman - while admitting that his own viewing of Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live over the past decade has invariably been via YouTube, NOT at time of broadcast - we shall return next weekend with the fourth installment of Saluting The Heroes Of Late Night TV.
Smack dab in the middle of the generation that watched Carson, Cavett and Letterman, as a frequently embarrassed boomer, most definitely got carried away in Saluting The Heroes Of Late Night TV Part One, but didn't even come close to running every compelling piece of footage from these great shows. Invariably, the need to actually finish the post someday took precedence - and didn't include at least a baker's dozen clips, starting with Jack Parr on The Dick Cavett Show.
So, here is yet another near-unending cornucopia of clips respectfully tipping our checkered caps (no doubt worn by Lloyd Hamilton and/or Curly Howard) to the heroes of late night, beginning with the debut episode of Late Night With David Letterman.
Big thanks to the Duke Mitchell Film Club for posting the following. Where's Sammy Petrillo?
It's true, Letterman featured some unusual interviews. This may be because Tom Snyder's shows, which specialized in unusual interviews, were also on late night at this time.
The king of scathing one-liners, Don Rickles, insult comic of insult comics, found his way to ALL the late night shows, including a very funny Dick Ebersol-era episode of Saturday Night Live.
Particularly hilarious was a January 1984 Tonight Show hosted by Joan Rivers featuring a guest appearance by Rickles, the only standup comedian (along with Rodney Dangerfield) who could match Joan for speed, ferocity and intensity of jokes. Looks like Don and Joan had a blast!
Steve Allen talked 1950's Tonight Show on a memorable episode of Late Night With David Letterman.
Don't know if the following was from Steve's late night show or his prime time program but who cares. . . he's actually interviewing freakin' Jack Kerouac! That said, Dick Cavett interviewed Allen Ginsburg on his late-night show.
It said something about 1960's TV that John & Jane Q. Public could turn on the orthicon tube and see interviews with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and Groucho Marx. Alas, Chico and Harpo had passed away by then.
Love the concept of booking Groucho and Debbie Reynolds (whose nightclub act was filled with jokes, comedy bits and celeb impressions) on the same show!
The sheer number of complete episodes of The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson available on YouTube is downright shocking, especially considering how many of the 1960's shows remain on the lost film list with LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT and Ernie Kovacs' DuMont Network series. While we didn't find any, unfortunately, with Groucho Marx as the guest host, it is a delight to see these early 1970's Tonight Shows, featuring Johnny at the peak of his comedic powers.
Today's post is a near-unending cornucopia of clips on the topic of (drum roll). . . late-night television, the medium exemplified by Steve Allen, Jack Parr, Johnny Carson and David Letterman.
As the medium has a 75+ year history extending back to the Harry Truman administration, it will not be possible to profile all the Heroes Of Late Night TV in this post, so this shall be merely Part One.
There are SO MANY CLIPS we don't know where to start. STILL looking for a clip from the Merv Griffin late-night show that ran on CBS from 1969-1972 in addition to the ones seen in The Story Of Late Night!
Broadway Open House, the briefly but tremendously popular show starring Jerry Lester and blonde bombshell comedienne Dagmar, which alternated in the early days of late-night on NBC with The Morey Amsterdam Show (not his subsequent 1950's program on the DuMont Network), originated late-night TV.
1954, notable for many things, including tons of excellent jazz, blues and early rock n' roll recordings, was the year The Tonight Show, hosted by Steve Allen, debuted.
At one point, Steve Allen alternated on Tonight with guest host
Ernie Kovacs in 1956. Unfortunately, as of this writing, there are no excerpts from the Ernie Kovacs Tonight Shows on YouTube, Venmo, Daily Motion, although several of the shows exist. Ernie and Steve share a seriously wacky sense of humor with their successors from decades later, David Letterman and Conan O'Brien.
Allen periodically appeared as a guest on talk shows for many decades after hosting his last Tonight Show in January 1957 and going on to several prime time comedy programs, the best known featuring Louis "Heigh Ho Steverino" Nye, Don Knotts, Tom Poston, Pat Harrington and Bill Dana.
There was an brief attempt at a post-Steve Allen late night TV show, America After Dark, that crashed and burned. Classic television and old time radio expert Don Yowp perceptively wrote all about it in a post titled The Tonight Show That Died.
Following Steve Allen as host in 1957: Jack Parr, a host on radio and daytime TV prior to The Tonight Show.
His first Tonight Show announcer, before Hugh Downs, was none other than the excellent movie comedian Franklin Pangborn (note: apologies for the quality of the following clip - it's the only one this blogger could find of Pangborn introducing Jack Parr).
Rather amazingly, kinescopes of Parr's 1957-1962 Tonight Shows exist.
One of this writer's favorite Jack Parr Tonight Show guests is the acerbic composer-pianist-writer and occasional actor Oscar Levant.
Another is the highly original improvisational comic Jonathan Winters, a frequent guest on The Tonight Show With Jack Parr.
There was no small amount of drama as Jack Parr walked off the Tonight Show in 1960 and eventually returned for two more seasons, with his last episode airing on March 30, 1962.
Carson had to complete his commitment to Who Do You Trust, a game show he was hosting, before he could succeed Parr as host in the fall.
Here, Dick Cavett recalls his years as a writer for Jack Parr, and how much he enjoyed Groucho Marx' appearances on the show.
Johnny Carson's first Tonight Show as host aired on October 1, 1962.
It's quite remarkable that they exist, given that Edie Adams, film, video and comedy preservation HERO, didn't personally rescue and preserve the existing Tonight Show tapes, as was done with the Ernie Kovacs shows.
The other two key figures in 1960's late-night television were diametric opposites: Joey Bishop and Dick Cavett.
The former, the sole teetotaler Rat Packer and star of a successful and funny sitcom that featured fellow comedians Corbett Monica, Guy Marks, and Joe Besser, was a frequent guest host for The Tonight Show in the 1960's and early 1970's.
Here's a Rat Packin' episode of Joey's late night show with guest stars Sammy Davis, Jr. and Peter Lawford.
The Dick Cavett Show, both the ABC late-night program and his subsequent interview show on PBS, merit seven or eight blog posts apiece. He merits an additional post for being the first guest on the debut episode of Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast!
We applaud Mr. Cavett for donating tapes of his many shows to the Library Of Congress.
As far as the late-night version of The Dick Cavett Show is concerned, an important sub-topic is how Cavett clearly aspired to something beyond mere showbiz entertainment and tackled the issues of the day in a way that we would NEVER, EVER see now.
Mr. Cavett, the Nebraska-born whitest dude of all of us took on the topic of racism and its accompanying religion of white supremacy in his 1960's late night shows.
Since bigotry, barbarism and cruelty remains a boffo cash cow for the vicious and amoral, this topic remains a third rail in horrifying 2025. Does it take courage to interview someone possessing such powerful intellect as James Baldwin did, knowing he could easily make you look like a blithering idiot at any moment? Yep.
Mr. Cavett nervously stumbled at several points in the interviews and flat-out admitted when he didn't understand questions and responses.
Cavett also liked jazz and rock n' roll as much as any television host until Letterman and Paul Shaffer came along.
Two of the most prolific Tonight Show guest hosts in the 1960's were Bob Newhart and Joan Rivers. Get Joan on the airwaves with Betty White and laughs shall follow!
Joan, veteran of Second City and countless standup gigs, could get Johnny ROFL!
Sincerely hope those early episodes of The Tonight Show turn up in some vault somewhere. Just one among stalwarts who appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in the 1960's, the exceptional actor and stand-up comic Godfrey Cambridge. He was on Tonight with Johnny three times!
Back in the mid-1970's, saw Bill Cosby, a comic Louis C.K. is truly ecstatic has not yet died, guest host the Johnny Carson Tonight Show and perform some extremely zany sketch comedy, the kind of material Eddie Murphy would brilliantly take to the next level just a few years later, for much of the show's 90 minutes. Eddie, not surprisingly killed on ALL the late night talk shows, as he did on Saturday Night Live.
Also guest hosting often: Garry Shandling, David Brenner, Joey Bishop and. . . that's right, Jerry Lewis. Here's Jerry with the most ubiquitous standup comedian on TV not named Alan King from the early 1950's through the 1970's, Jack Carter.
During the transition between Parr and Carson in 1962, Jerry guest hosted for Johnny, as did Groucho Marx, Art Linkletter, Donald O'Connor, Joey Bishop, Hugh Downs, and Mort Sahl and got chart-topping Neilsen ratings, so ABC-TV, with high hopes to replicate the late night magic of Parr and Carson in prime time, signed him for an ambitious 2 hour Saturday night program with elements of both the traditional variety program a la Ed Sullivan and the Tonight-style talk show.
There is a complete episode of The Jerry Lewis Show on YouTube. It's known to music fans for an appearance by the great Sam Cooke. Historian Kliph Nesteroff, writer of several superlative books as well as the History Of Comedy documentary series, penned a superb piece about Jerry's short-lived 1963 variety show, as well as the late-night successes of Steve Allen, Jack Parr and Johnny Carson, for WFMU's Beware Of The Blog.
Before moving on from The King Of Late Night to another potentate of Late Night, one who could be imagined saying "at least I'm not an impotentate" - David Letterman.
There's a decade between Cavett's late night show and the debut of Late Night With David Letterman in February 1982. David Letterman and his team of writers, led by Merrill Markoe, crafted a franchise which was both more sophisticated and goofier than Carson. Letterman started on NBC, after guest hosting for Johnny Carson numerous times in 1980-1981, with a morning show that was enjoyably unorthodox and almost as wacky as the Ernie Kovacs morning show extravaganzas.
Much appreciated the Late Night With David Letterman focus on spotlighting three generations of comedians. Love seeing the likes of Bob & Ray, the Pythons and the stalwarts of Second City on with Dave? In the words of former San Francisco Giants outfielder Hunter Pence, YES! YES! YES!
So now, after Jack Parr's 1983 appearance on Late Night With David Letterman, Part One of Saluting The Heroes Of Late Night TV closes. We respectfully doff a battered top hat worn by either Dagmar, Jerry Lester or Milton Delugg from Broadway Open House to Don Giller, source of Dave clips galore, as well as Dick Cavett, whoever found all those 1960's Tonight Shows and the knowledgeable 20th century pop culture aficionados who produced the 70 Years Of The Tonight Show videos seen in this post.
