JOHNNY CARSON

Discussing the Johnny Carson film: I was a fan. To me stand-up comics are as necessary to our culture as artists. My favorites just now are Jon Stewart, Louis CK and Patton Oswalt. I like to watch Chelsea Handler, although I like her personality more than her comic bits. Being as she "is" is her most effective statement -- I think -- in terms of trying to find and live some kind of edge in the chaotic clutter of our ricky-ticky pop culture, with its commanding pervasiveness and the undertones of darkness always creeping in, sometimes taking over whole memes, trends, groups, bodies, similar to archetypical science fiction plots. I was profoundly affected by Richard Pryor, breathtakingly on the edge and beyond brilliant. I don't think he can be actually described, except by saying his name. To go back to Carson, long ago even when I knew little about him I saw him as not just a comic but a person who performed by putting on a carefully crafted persona, like an entire body suit. Part of the fascination was to enjoy the performance - more like a one-man show than a stand-up routine – and keep alert for the brief seconds when the other Johnny peered through the curtain of himself. Also fun to watch him watching and assessing himself, more and more as time went on...and he subtly let us in on the game, the irony, the dissonance, how odd life is. Incremental revelations about his contrasting private life confirmed what lots of us had intuited, without knowledge. He had a lively intelligence, with the gift of curiosity, keenly aware of the peculiarity of the place he had landed, practical in using the money thus earmed to construct co-lives, some comradely and comforting, one the life of a loner who made sure his hermitage was perfectly made for him, and well protected. I didn’t watch tv for many years, just Carson at night. His predecessors I had not seen except in clips. In contrast Carson was cool, as the film said, and classy with a core of what I'll call a well-honed quietness that strengthened and protected him -- AND his audience in a way. But the underlying awareness of the menace or darkness in life was never not there. You didn't worry when you were watching him. Of course, sometimes we need to be worried and brought to levels of sorrow and outrage and so on... I like that in comics and artists. Now I think about it, which of the essential 20th century visual artists would have expressed something akin to Carson... maybe The Scream as candidate, also Broadway Boogie Woogie, some paintings by Van Gogh. Musicians of course, lots of them, would have been and are Johnny-like. Too bad he didn't get to really know Bruce Springsteen -- or did he? Don't know -- holes in my memory.