Now that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has been cancelled for losing millions of dollars a year, it seems like an odd time for CBS News to run a glowing piece about how great Johnny Carson was, but that’s exactly what they did.
CBS News Sunday Morning did a glowing segment about how Carson united the country and actually told jokes that viewers would talk about the next day. Was this a not-so-subtle jab at Colbert?
Nicholas Fondacaro of NewsBusters:
Shots at Colbert? CBS Reminisces About Johnny Carson as Late Night WithersAfter weathering a week of blistering heat from the rest of the liberal media following the announcement that The Late Show and host Stephen Colbert were being kicked to the curb, CBS seemed to respond in the form of a love letter to Johnny Carson and reminiscing about what late night used to look like. CBS News Sunday Morning put together a piece remarking on how Carson brought people “peace,” “hope,” and laughter at the end of the day instead of being a divisive political silo.“With so much talk about the future of late-night TV shows just now, we thought it was the perfect time for Jim Axelrod to take a look back to a time when late night was the place to be and ruled by a most singular man,” proclaimed fill-in host Tracy Smith as she introduced the segment…Despite the proliferation of televisions, none of them could hold a candle it to Carson’s draw. “Everybody who was anybody appeared on The Tonight Show and 17 million Americans tuned in, many from their beds,” Axelrod noted. “His audience, more than triple the size of all three current network late night shows combined, made him the national agenda setter of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.”On how Carson was able to pull off such a herculean feat, Carson biographer Mike Thomas proposed that, “Johnny brought a lot of people peace at the end of the day. People loved to laugh. But I think he gave them hope that the world would go on the next day, no matter what was happening.”
Watch the segment below:
Stephen Colbert could have learned a thing or two from Johnny Carson. This clip of Carson has been in heavy rotation on Twitter/X recently, for obvious reasons. It appears to be from an interview Carson did with 60 Minutes, in which he explains why politicizing late night TV would be a horrible idea.
I’ll leave you with this clip of Rodney Dangerfield cracking Johnny up on The Tonight Show in 1979. If you want to skip Dangerfield’s standup set, just go to the 4:00 mark:
Featured image via YouTube.
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