Word: carson
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...Publishers Weekly nonfiction best-seller list. Crowds lined up around the block in midtown Manhattan last week just to get Stern to autograph copies. Quite a response to a 435-page autobiography filled with explicit sex talk, nasty put-downs of such celebrities as Johnny Carson and Arsenio Hall, and rampant ethnic slurs (''How do you like those Hispanic chicks who dye their hair blond? That's an attractive look. No wonder some Spanish guys are ready to rape any white woman who comes along''.) As for Ted Danson, he's still dealing with the fallout from a rare stab...
...Vegas twice for material that today would seem tame (one offending routine was about his own "skinny ass"). At the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wis., he so riled up a conservative crowd with his jokes about Vietnam that he nearly caused an audience riot. Even Johnny Carson banned him as a Tonight Show guest for a time because of his reputation as a drug abuser...
Things began to change when political satirists took on a dual role as talk-show hosts. Johnny Carson, whose topical wisecracks helped define the national mood in the 1970s and '80s, played it strictly down the middle and made sure nothing cut too deep; after all, you never know which butt of your jokes might show up one night on the guest couch. In truth, relatively few of the era's political leaders appeared on Carson's show: not Jimmy Carter, or Gerald Ford, or even Ronald Reagan after he became a presidential candidate. One exception was a young Arkansas...
...current late-night satirists, however, owe less to Carson than to other groundbreaking stand-ups of the '70s, like Robert Klein. In his sharp routines on Watergate and other Nixon-era outrages, Klein didn't depend on cool, Carson-style one-liners. He re-created the offending scenes and characters and skewered them with parody, sarcasm and ironic hyperbole. It was a more subversive and conspiratorial form of satire, luring the audience into the comedian's world view, carried along by attitude, not jokes...
...even makeover shows have become about sprucing up your psyche. Carson Kressley (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) makes over women with body-image issues on Lifetime's How to Look Good Naked. To Kressley, the secret is finding not the right bra size but the right frame of mind, shedding not pounds but psychological baggage. Like a Dove commercial writ large, he gets plus-size women to see that they're sexy through such subtle steps as plastering cheesecake pictures of them on billboards and videotaping the hubba-hubba comments of passersby. Likewise, on the Bravo show Tim Gunn...