Allow me a few paragraphs of time travel, and let’s go back to Johnny Carson’s monologue the night after Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon.
I’m paraphrasing here, but I think the joke still works 57 years after Carson first delivered it.
“The good news,” he said, “is that Armstrong landed safely on the moon. Unfortunately, his luggage landed on Mars.”
The joke was topical, it was familiar to anyone who has ever had a suitcase lost by an airline (or worried about it) and offered us a universal bonding moment, as well as a smile, after all the moon-shot anxiety.
That Carson crack was uttered when late-night TV was an American obsession. When we went to work the next day, we instinctively asked the bleary-eyed person at the next desk, “Did you see Carson last night?”
For nearly 30 years, his was the show to watch between your feet, the last laugh you had as you laid your head on the pillow and drifted off.
He was also one of the late-nighters who included, for better or worse, Jack Paar, Dick Cavett, Joan Rivers, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon, Arsenio Hall, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jon Stewart and his marvelous revolving cast, and until last week, Stephen Colbert.
As millions of us now mourn the passing of Colbert from the airwaves, there are TV critics decrying the loss of an “institution.” By this, they mean “The Tonight Show.” And in a more sinister sense, they mean the cowardly CBS.
But these are matters for the critics. There’s a bigger loss than the late-night institution symbolized by “The Tonight Show.” And a bigger loss than the faith and trust millions of us once placed in CBS as “the Tiffany Network.” That lofty regard has now been lost by a series of that network’s sellouts.
What we’re losing as politics shoves Colbert off-stage, and Jimmy Kimmel returns from a professional death sentence after his own brush with Donald Trump’s War on Laughter, is a sense of a national community of shared comic perception.
For two-thirds of a century, we’ve gathered as a tribe around the video campfire and shed the cares of the day by laughing at them, and realizing we’re not alone.
Even in this politically divided time in America, the comics have given us nightly reminders of the beliefs and the burdens we share. Are most of the late-night yucks built around liberal politics? Yes, but Donald Trump is clearly the biggest political buffoon of our time, so that’s where the laughs are.
But they were there too (though not in such ripe, assembly-line abundance) when those in the White House were named Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton.
Or have we already forgotten the name Monica Lewinsky?
The late-night folks help us, as a nation, to blow off steam. Our leaders, whatever their political party, tick us off. Our defense is to laugh at them. Every president has taken the hits, knowing it comes with the job.
As the great philosopher Bruce Springsteen recently remarked, Trump is the only president we’ve ever had who can’t take a joke. Johnny Carson would have sent Trump to the moon, with or without his luggage.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University)
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