Carson's Comedy Classics

Carson's Comedy Classics is a stripped half-hour syndicated television show that was first released to U.S. television stations in 1985. The program was made from segments and sketches taken from the first 20 years of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962-1982). Johnny Carson's full tenure on the program, which originally aired on the NBC Television Network, was from 1962 to 1992. The series is narrated by Ed McMahon, who, as a voiceover, introduces the program and each of the segments. The series was one of the results of Carson coming to terms with NBC on a contract extension in 1981. In exchange for his continued services, Carson received ownership of the show, including the rights to the entire extant archive of his hosting span. Carson's Comedy Classics was one of the most immediate ways Carson cashed in on his product; he and his staff created a clip show consisting of highlights from the 20 years of The Tonight Show Carson had hosted up to that point and sold the rights to Columbia Pictures Television for $26 million. When Carson would have his annual Tonight Show Anniversary Show in prime time on NBC, the anniversary shows were mainly flashback clip shows, and it was usually the same vintage sketches which got the showcase on the shows (examples being Ed Ames' classic miffed tomahawk throw from 1965, Carson and Jack Webb doing a sketch about Copper Clappers from 1968, and John Twomey playing "Stars and Stripes Forever" with his hands from 1974; later anniversary shows would feature stand-up comedians, new sketches and clips from the previous year of Tonight Shows). The popularity of the anniversary shows helped lead to the creation of Carson's Comedy Classics, which is essentially a classic clip show edited down to a half an hour. Carson's Comedy Classics showed that there were many other classic sketches and segments that had rarely if ever been seen between the original airing and 1982-1983 (when the show was put into production). Many of the sketches and segments in Carson's Comedy Classics have never been released on DVD either.