HEAR JACK PAAR'S ACTUAL WALKOUT SPEECH AFTER THE "READ MORE" JUMP IN THIS COLUMN!
With Jay Leno and David Letterman, the Princes of late night television, its hard for my kids to realize that title was held by Johnny Carson for more than 30 years before Jay and David. For Baby Boomers, (anyone born toward the end of World War II), the King of Late Night wasn’t Johnny Carson. It was a guy named Jack Paar.
Jack was named the host of “The Tonight Show” when Steve Allen’s tenure ended in 1957. While Allen was funny, Jack Paar was funny... and controversial. He was not afraid to take on the biggies, like the most feared show biz columnist of the time Walter Winchell or even Ed Sullivan. But his biggest fight was with his bosses at NBC. On the evening of February 11th 1960, Jack Paar walked off “The Tonight Show.” He left because NBC had censored a joke from his show the night before. The joke was about a British lady and a water closet. The joke wouldn’t shock a third grade class today but NBC thought it was offensive and chopped it, all four and a half minutes of it. As a teenager, I saw that show and wondered why NBC all of a sudden cut away to a five minute newscast. I knew something had to be up. I remember staying up late the next night to see the show, as it had been on the news that Jack had walked out. America knew this before the show aired at 11:15pm eastern, because, a couple of years before, they had started recording the shows in the early evening using a modern marvel called videotape.
Paar was on for about five minutes when he said, “I’m leaving “The Tonight Show.” (Audience sighs in shock). “There must be a better way of making a living than this,” and he got up and walked off leaving sidekick Hugh Downs with 85 minutes to fill. The walkout caused a sensation. It was all people talked about for three weeks until Jack finally came back after NBC apologized.
What was the big deal about the joke? The joke, itself, was mild, even for 1960.It has been printed many times in the following years, but there is apparently no recording of it anywhere. More than likely the honchos at the network just hit “delete.” In fact, the show on which Jack made his triumphal return does not seem to exist either. Most of Paar’s “Tonight” shows were taped over by the network so the tapes could be used again. Gives you an idea of the mentality of the executives who made the decision to cut the joke. Well, I guess your curiosity must be hanging by a thread right about now wondering what the heck all the fuss was about, so without further ado, here’s the joke America never heard:
