Johnny Carson and "Lucifer's Hammer"

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanC.htm#johnny.carson.rip

Johnny Carson, RIP: These days, when late-night talk shows, even ones hosted by obviously bright fellows like Conan O'Brien, consist of nothing but celebrity chit-chat, it's hard to imagine just how intellectually wide-ranging Carson's Tonight Show was. Carson's particular interest was astronomy and he made his frequent guest Carl Sagan a national celebrity. The science fiction classic Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle about the approach and catastrophic impact of a comet includes a brilliant chapter written from Johnny Carson's point of view as he interviews the two astronomers who discovered the approaching comet and figures out on the fly how to guide them into making their esoteric topic fascinating to the masses in TV land.

Even at interviewing movie stars, Carson was dramatically better than Letterman and Leno.

My favorite Carson memory is of the time in the early 1990s when he had on the high school students who had won a national quiz bowl championship. So, he, Ed McMahon, and Doc Severinsen played the four kids using real questions about history and science. Johnny, who no doubt had been the brightest boy in his class back home in Iowa, buzzed in to answer just about every question, but always a fraction of a second behind the teenage whiz kids. His frustration at finding that in his sixties he just wasn't as quick as the teenagers was compounded by his discovery that his teammates, Ed and Doc, were complete idiots of no use whatsoever in winning the competition. Finally, the question "Who founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886?" stumped the students, but not Johnny, who triumphantly buzzed in and proclaimed "Samuel Gompers!" with the proudest look I've ever seen on his face.

Carson's 30 year career on television, an unbelievably long time for a star to remain a star, was a model of professionalism. Starting to slump as he got older, he insisted on cutting the length of the nightly show from 90 minutes to 60 minutes, and rebounded strongly. Rather than hang around into senescence, he retired in his mid-60s while still on top of his game.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com