Don Giller

Been watching reruns of Johnny Carson and here’s an underrated part of his legacy: 90 MINUTES every night is a lot of time to fill.

One thing I notice is when the show shifted to one hour, it got less interesting. That last half hour had guests like Truman Capote and animal rights activists and really long conversations. It was a little more Cavett-like. When that vanished, it became all showbiz.

Another thing I notice is many of the monologue jokes are just shockingly terrible. His delivery aside, some of them are dismal, tossed-off, lazy, way worse than bad talk show jokes today.

Last night, they aired an interview with Charles Grodin around 1980 that was spectacularly cringey. It was the same dynamic Grodin had with Letterman, but it felt like like he was discovering it, finding the joy in hostility and Carson playing along.

I do recall he did that with Carson as well, I assumed it had started even earlier.

Yah, i was ignorant of the JC appearances. The one i saw, Grodin laughed some, which he didn’t do with DL.

I recall seeing Grodin on Letterman soon after JC retired and DL had gotten the big CBS deal and Grodin was suggesting to DL that JC had always shared his money with the top guests and DL should do the same. It was very funny.