Johnny Carson (1925-2005) hosted The Tonight Show for 30 years, racking up 23,000 guests. Not quite as impressive but an accomplishment just the same: comedian Mark Malkoff hosted The Carson Podcast for eight years, notching 400 guests. Many of them--largely Tonight Show couch sitters and insiders--shared invaluable and record-correcting insights that Malkoff includes in his beguiling valentine, Love Johnny Carson: One Obsessive Fan's Journey to Find the Genius Behind the Legend.
The book probably contains just enough of Carson's backstory to meet the legal definition of a biography. While Malkoff touches on his subject's middle-class Midwestern upbringing, his focus is the show that Carson began hosting in 1962, when he took over for Jack Paar. Malkoff submits that Carson's Tonight Show worked because of his "cordiality, calmness, cool, warmth, wit, and love"--qualities that the book demonstrates coexisted with some offscreen character flaws (philandering, emotionally distant parenting). The careers of Carson's guests had a way of exploding following their Tonight Show appearances (see Jay Leno and Joan Rivers). Meanwhile, Carson had a retaliative streak that was out in full force when a guest crossed him (see Jay Leno and Joan Rivers).
Love Johnny Carson can read like an oral history as Malkoff's podcast interviewees assess Carson's talents and dissect his monologues and skits to determine how the comedy sausage was made. Like a golden-age talk show, Malkoff's book is a breezy entertainment with an easygoing style that conceals all the grueling work that surely went into making it. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer