Happy 100th birthday, Johnny Carson! Bakersfield forgives you
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) – Erudite but boyish, sophisticated but self-deprecating, but, above all else, funny: That was legendary late night talk show host Johnny Carson, who would have turned 100 on Oct. 23.
If you paid attention, you could see that Carson was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, and yet he seemed utterly without pretension.
But did Carson, who died in 2005, have to make all of those cruel Bakersfield jokes in his “Tonight Show” monologues? What gives?
We had to deal with one-liners like this:
Why do people in Bakersfield wear pointed shoes? To kick the cockroaches into the corner.
For that insulting little gem we can thank the one-time, longtime king of late-night, a man who reigned decades before Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Steven Colbert entered the picture.
Bakersfield was one of Carson’s favorite, all-purpose punch lines. If it was hick, if it was Mayberry, if it was out of touch or 30 years behind the mainstream, it was Bakersfield. So, thanks in no small measure to one of the most popular men in America, the name Bakersfield came to have the same ring in many American ears as Peoria or Poughkeepsie.
A tinnier ring, really. We were the Poland of so many Polish jokes, the guy who walks into a bar with a dog that does all his talking for him. America’s municipal dumb blond.
Carson opened the floodgates and a gush of cultural references about Bakersfield, few of them complimentary, followed.
At least Carson came by his Bakersfield caricature honestly. In the mid-1950s, before he made it big, Carson performed here regularly. It was a way to try out new material.
Before Highway 99 moved a few miles west and became a freeway, Union Avenue was a neon-lined bottleneck on the state’s main north-south thoroughfare. If you were driving from San Francisco to L.A., or even Las Vegas, you motored down Union Avenue, stuck behind hay trucks and Saturday-night yahoos, past the bustle of the Bakersfield Inn, Maison Jaussaud and all of the rest.
It was the Bakersfield “strip” — not exactly Vegas, but in 1955 not so far behind it, either.
Johnny Carson brought his straight-faced schtick here several times, cracking up the farmers and the oilmen sitting in the leather booths in their spit-shined cowboy boots alongside their fur-stole-clad wives.
Long after Carson replaced Jack Paar as NBC’s late-night guy in 1962, long after he got too big to work the nightclub circuit, Bakersfield — the first sign of civilization north of Los Angeles — stayed with him. How Bakersfield wished it hadn’t.
But why? What did Johnny Carson have against us? Bakersfield residents Nona and Jim Darling set out to find out in 1990. They attended a taping of the show in Burbank and were delighted to see Carson himself come out to warm up the audience. Carson asked if anyone in the crowd had questions. And they did.
Well, he didn’t know Nona Darling, did he?
“I elbow my wife and say, ‘Ask him why he always makes fun of Bakersfield.’ Because Nona Darling is fearless,” Jim Darling said. “He immediately launches into every Bakersfield joke he’s ever done, rapid fire. It was (getting) the biggest laughs. He got the whole pre-show routine (rolling with it). And I’m sinking lower and lower and lower into my seat, like, ‘Why did I suggest that?’ You know, it’s just humiliating. And people are just having a good laugh at our expense.”
After the opening monologue and the first commercial break, Carson, now seated next to sidekick Ed McMahon behind that familiar desk, recapped the exchange with the Darlings.
“We want to thank all you fans for coming tonight, especially all you loyal fans from Bakersfield,” Carson said, and the audience whooped in delight.
“And you love Bakersfield,” said McMahon, helpfully.
“Yeah, I guess in the past I’ve made a few jokes about Bakersfield, California,” Carson said. “And no offense. It’s a nice city.”
“But you went to Bakersfield when you first started doing your nightclub act,” McMahon said.
“Yes, I did, years ago,” Carson said. “In 1955, I went to Bakersfield to break in a nightclub act at a place called Maison Jaussaud.
“Is that still there?,” Carson said, looking in the direction of the Darlings. “Yeah? Is it a nice place?”
“And they were closed,” Darling said, looking back on that day 35 years ago. “They were shuttered. I yell out, ‘Yeah, it’s really nice.’”
“Yeah?,” Carson responded. “I did the act there. I died. Died. Died in Bakersfield.”
“It made me feel good,” Darling said, recalling the moment. “A little redemption.”
Was Carson being fair? An ad in The Bakersfield Californian had promoted his appearance at Maison Jaussaud – now the Golden West Casino – as featuring ‘one of the bright young men of show business.’ A review of that very first show, also published in The Californian, described the effort as ‘a solid hit with patrons’ and Carson himself as ‘one of the very best of the post-war comedians.’
Alas, there never was any kind of reconciliation. Mayor Mary K. Shell, who brought back the Bakersfield Christmas parade after a decades long hiatus, invited Carson to serve as the parade’s grand marshal one year. She got no response.
In the minds of millions, Bakersfield must have been one traffic signal and a Dairy Queen. In the minds of some, it probably still is. But now Bakersfield is a metro area of 700,000, if you include all of the pockets and appendages, and a sizable percentage of that growth has come from greater L.A. We’ve got a second stoplight now, with a third on the way.
Not bad for the town Johnny Carson often not-so-affectionately referred to as ‘the armpit of California.’
We forgive you, Johnny. Happy birthday.
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