This week on The Late-Night Time Machine, we travel back to June 13, 1979, and the Burbank set of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Carnac the Magnificent was behind the desk, and a joke was about to flop.
Johnny Carson was known for being a good sport when a joke didn’t land—as he proved earlier that same year when a fly interrupted his already spoiling monologue.
But on this night, Carson, as all great artists must do from time to time, fully positioned himself against his audience in defense of a joke.
In fact, on this night, he gave the audience the bird.
As even casual Carson fans know, Carnac was one of the host’s most-beloved and well-known characters. Carnac was a riff on an old comedy tradition: whimsical answers given in the form of questions. Sporting a turban and flowing cape, the “mystical” Carnac was a psychic, a “visitor from the East,” as Ed McMahon introduced him. (These were not culturally sensitive times.)
As Carnac, Carson would enter the stage, nearly tripping as he made his way back to his desk. Once seated, McMahon would hand him a stack of “hermetically sealed” envelopes containing questions the great man of magic could answer by merely holding the envelope to his head.
Carson as Carnac would then rip the envelope, dramatically blow air into the envelope, thus widening it up for his fingers, pluck the paper from inside, and read the question.
On this night, Carnac was on a roll.
“Dracula and the OPEC nations,” he said, holding the envelope up to his head.
Rip. Blow. Pull. Read.
“Name two things that want to suck you dry,” he said, starring into the camera at a nation grappling with an oil crisis brought on by the Iranian revolution.
The in-studio audience burst into laughter and applause. But they would soon turn on him. The next set-up: “Gary Coleman.”
For those too young to remember, Gary Coleman was a then-eleven-year-old child actor who starred on the NBC sitcom Diff’rent Strokes. Having suffered a kidney disease from birth, Coleman’s growth was permanently stunted from medication taken after two kidney transplants. His adult height would reach just 4 feet 8 inches.
As The Guardian described Coleman after his death at 42, he was “unanimously considered the cutest and sassiest of child stars on television.” Though his later years would bring a series of health, financial, and legal troubles, on this night in 1979, Coleman was a beloved child actor, raking in some $100,000 per episode for his work on the show. But that did not mean that audiences were quite ready to laugh at the beloved sitcom star.
And thus, we return once more to Carnac. “Gary Coleman,” he said.
Rip. Blow. Pull. Read.
“What does Wilt Chamberlain look like from the moon.”
Some initial laughs. But then a big expression of shock from the audience. A few: “Woah-ho-hos.” Then, a rare response from a Carson crowd: boos.
Carson stays cool. He places the envelope down on the desk. He pauses and looks up again. He stares at the camera. Then, Carson’s right hand slowly moves up from the bottom of the frame, out from behind the desk and towards his right cheek. He brings the hand up to his face and elegantly brushes his cheek with his middle finger.
A few attentive audience members notice and laugh. And surely the home audience, able to see Carson perfectly framed in a nice medium close-up, from the torso up, caught the gesture in full. McMahon seemed to have caught sight of it too. “Time for Carnac to clean-up,” he said to a clearly annoyed Carson.
“May a pregnant camel drop her water over your marital bed,” the host replied, casting one of the “curses” that often came with a negative response to a joke. It was later called the “Carnac Saver.”
Antagonism was common for Carnac bits, which hinged around a sort of call and response with the audience. After all, Carson here plays a kind of carnival magician, trying to swindle them with his act. They should be suspicious. But with the finger, Carson raised the stakes to a new level.
While some Carson defenders claim he did not, in fact, flip off the crowd, the general consensus is that he not only did, but that he wanted the audience—or at least the at home audience—to see the antipathy he felt towards the in-studio crowd. He was hiding it for the censors, but not the viewer.
As was the case with so much of Carson’s comedy, hands matter. After all, in Carson, one sees a trained magician, always interested in honoring the craft that is sleight of hand. So much of the Carnac bit itself hinges around his hands, the bringing of the envelope to the forehand, the dissecting the card from within.
As Carnac, Carson knows his audience is trained to look at his hands. And with them, on that night, he seemed to send a message: they can turn on you just as quickly as they can make you laugh.
Watch the fulll segment below:
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Talk about overanalyzing.