As a late night talk show junkie it was a delight to find out from Pop Candy that podcaster Mark Malkoff is tracking down contemporaries of Johnny Carson for a new show called The Carson Podcast.
In addition to sharing their memories of Carson, the subjects often (and understandably) delve into their own careers, which makes for a whole even more enjoyable layer of entertainment than I ever expected.
For example, Malkoff interviews Teresa Ganzel, who as a 10-year participant in the Mighty Carson Art Players did sketches with Carson. The highlight for me is when Ganzel talks about making 1982′s The Toy with Jackie Gleason and Richard Pryor. She described Pryor (due to his 1980 freebasing cocaine accident, where he seriously burned more than half of his body) as while funny he was also fragile and “there was the sad clown about him”.
As for Jackie Gleason? “He had an old-fashioned manservant…a valet…this would have really been wrong if the manservant looked offended by it…the manservant looked completely happy,” she assured listeners-but the whole time I was thinking as I listened to her description-that poor fellow was anything but happy. “Jackie had hand signals: One snap meant ‘bring me a cigarette’; two snaps meant ‘bring me a chair’…it was so unbelievable and so old school…That was their deal. Everybody was happy.”
From the number of times she said happy, it just instilled some doubts in my mind. See for yourself when she gets to that story a little bit after the 33-minute mark of a 44-minute interview.
Other episodes feature Tom Dreesen, Steven Wright, Charles Grodin and Martin Mull.
Malkoff is a fine interviewer and I look forward to seeing all the different subjects he will be able to book over the course of this project.
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