Word: paars
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...whole new class of TV-age entertainers-the just-talkers. But his appeal has little in common with Steve Allen's brash sidewalk zaniness or Arthur Godfrey's somnolent saloon drone. When Paar appears on screen, there is an odd, hesitant hitch to his stride. For a split self-effacing second he is a late arrival, worried that he has blundered into the wrong party. His shy smile-he has developed one of the shiest smiles in the business-seems to ask a question: "Is this applause for me?" Then he remembers: he is really the host. Almost...
...surrounded by a band, singers, guest comedians, skits. But what really gives the Paar show its shape is the L formed by a scarred desk and a well-worn couch. Behind the desk, Jack is barricaded; the couch supports a "panel" of regular or irregular conversationalists. Says Paar: "The show is nothing. Just me and people talking. Historic naturalness. We don't act, we just defend ourselves...
Most of the time, Paar is merely a good listener with a knack of asking the right questions. He may be as fast on the ad-lib draw as the next gag-toting desperado, but again and again he lets himself be "topped." He is all the world's straight man. And yet, Paar can hit. A caustic remark, a misconstrued question, a real or fancied attack in or out of the studio can provoke stinging repartee. When Winchell attacked him for a misstatement made by Elsa Maxwell on the show, Paar counterpunched fiercely, guessed-on the air-that...
...same element of unpredictability-the suggestion that a mild explosive has been put into the prominently displayed tumblers of Sponsor Lipton's tea-derives from the widespread belief that Paar permits off-color humor. On the whole the charge is unjust. The show's most celebrated blue note was struck while Paar was on vacation and Stand-In Jonathan Winters allowed Anthropologist Ashley Montague to talk about how lack of breast feeding gives American males a bosom fixation. Jack says he would never have permitted it ("After breast feeding, there's just no place...
...Gamble. When asked about Jack Paar, the late Fred Allen once said: "Oh, you mean the young man who had the meteoric disappearance." A year ago the description still fitted Paar, sometime minor movie actor and perennial radio-TV summer replacement. He had done well with a radio program and a daytime television show of his own, but never well enough to make it big. One TV executive dismissed him as strictly a "pipe and slipper type." What happened next is told by NBC's Board Chairman Robert Sarnoff: "We faced a critical decision. The America After Dark version...