Posted
on October 23, 2014
One
of the America's favorite TV talk shows has been The Tonight Show,
which has been on as long as I've been alive. (Translation: a
loooooong time!) It is the longest currently running regularly
scheduled entertainment program in the U.S. and the third
longest-running show of any sort on NBC. And it owes a lot of its
success to Johnny Carson, who headed the show for THIRTY years!
(Of
course, other amazing talents have also headed the show: Steve Allen,
Jack Paar, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, and now Jimmy Fallon.)
Well,
today is Johnny Carson's birthday. And in honor of this most
excellent of TV talk show hosts, today has been declared TV Talk Show
Host Day!
 |
| One of Carson's repeating characters was a funny "psychic" named Carnak the Magnificent. |
Carson
actually helped show up some of these psychics as fakes on his show. For example, Carson and magician James Randi showed that Israeli so-called psychic Uri Geller was a fake; Geller was unable to do his famous spoon-bending trick because Carson supplied the spoons.
Carson and Randi teamed up again to prove that the faith healer Peter Popoff was a charlatan. Carson also helped to support Randi's efforts to debunk junk pseudoscience and promote skepticism by donating to the James Randi Foundation and The Amazing Meetings.
Carson also helped the field of science by sometimes inviting scientists onto the show. He invited astronomer Carl Sagan onto the show 26 times!
And now that he is gone, I appreciate the efforts of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as well. Hooray for comedians as talk show hosts!
Also
on this date:
Check
out my Pinterest boards for:
And
here are my Pinterest boards for:
No comments:
Post a Comment