Word: cavett
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Carson will smile and bob his head and smooth his tie while the audience laughs. If the joke flies wide or falls flat, the audience will groan and Carson will look wounded, then drop some self-deprecating aside that, like a slow fuse, will finally ignite the gag. Dick Cavett, who worked for Carson as a writer, recalls that Carson "made a point of bombing and making it funny. Sometimes you'd write strictly for that. You'd set up one baddie, just for the saver." A lot of comedians have done this, but none has raised...
This image, which has received wide circulation, seems always to have rankled Carson and somewhat baffled his associates, past and present. Such diverse hands as Cavett, professional Wild Man Pat McCormick and Writer-Director Marshall Brickman, who all put in typewriter-time at the Carson Stables, speak not only of his considerable editorial skills but of his ease as an employer. If Carson, on camera, suggests simultaneously a verbal glibness and an emotional reserve, that is usually considered Midwestern; it is the same reserve that is the core of his charm and longevity. His audiences derive from Carson not only...
Carson's precision-tooled comedic skills owe much, as Cavett points out, to certain illustrious forebears: Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bob Hope-"and Oliver Hardy-that burn, that long look into the lens." Surely Jonathan Winters was the inspiration for such Carson characters as the garrulous Aunt Blabby, the right-wing dimwit Floyd R. Turbo, even the huckstering greaseball Art Fern. Carnac the Magnificent is Steve Allen's Answer Man in swami's drag, and the Mighty Carson Art Players are Fred Allen's Mighty Allen Art Players with unreliable props. Carson's borrowings...
When that sentence was pronounced on the Dick Cavett show last winter, fireworks were expected. Mailer had never been known to ignore a taunt; he had devoted whole chapters to demolitions of competing writers. Instead, there was an uncharacteristic silence. Six months later, Mailer has provided an answer. But it, too, is atypical. For if, as the editor of his new book claims, Mailer was "the literary world's finest counterpuncher" since Hemingway, he no longer deserves the title or the hype. Pieces and Pontifications demonstrates that, despite a pugilistic stance, the author has deserted the ring for color...
...clear that Noguchi, a naturalized citizen who emigrated from Tokyo in 1952, is a habitual grandstander. He has been a guest on the Dick Cavett show, and the TV character Quincy is partly modeled on him. "Noguchi is the Salvador Dali of forensic pathology," says a coroner from an East Coast city...