Don't get me wrong, I like Johnny Carson as much as the next guy (or at least as much as the next guy who grew up with Letterman). But the bombardment of utterly uniform hagiographic tributes rankles the contrarian in me. Almost involuntarily, I start to search my memory for anything that might have bugged me about the guy.
That's how I recalled the clips you're about to watch. I first saw them years ago on the amazing public access cable program Media Shower, hosted by Jamie Greenberg. They show Carson indulging in some spectacularly poor judgment when it comes to racial matters. And comedy. The more dramatic second clip, in which Carson does blackface and ebonics, is actually the less disturbing. Yes, most people knew by then that such antics aren't funny, and yes, the joke is too lame to justify the caricature, but still, it was an attempt at satire that a person might be inclined to forgive.
The ad-libbed first clip, however, is something different. It starts cringe-worthy and then turns jaw-dropping (if you don't catch it at first, it's repeated).
Here are the clips (If that's slow, here's a backup), complete with Greenberg's astute commentary. They come to you courtesy of my friend Andrew Hearst. I contacted Andrew immediately when I thought of this, because he once wrote an article about Media Shower and I was hoping that he'd kept all his tapes. As it happened, Andrew had also been thinking about the clips, and my e-mail was enough to get him digitizing them. As it also happens, Andrew has just launched a blog, Panopticist, which promises to be a major new player in the pop-culture blogosphere. Here's his take on the clips.
Update: The clip has been MeFi'd, so be patient. Also, there's a plausible suggestion in the MeFi comments that Carson doesn't actually say the one particularly bad thing that Jamie, Andrew and I heard him say.
