It wasn’t that Johnny Carson didn’t like female comedians, exactly. It’s that he preferred a particular type. “To make the cut, a female performer had to project a nonthreatening ‘golly-jeepers-oh-Johnny’ quality, like Carol Wayne,” according to William Knoedelseder’s I’m Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy’s Golden Era. “She had to appeal to older male viewers who liked to go to Vegas. If she wasn’t a bimbo, she at least had to be willing to play one on TV.”
Carol Wayne was willing. She’d bounce onstage next to Carson’s Art Fern character, delivering breathy lines like “Come to San Andreas Village Estates and get a hold of some terra firma!”
Carson/Fern ogled the cleavage revealed by Wayne’s low-cut dress. “And your terra is pretty firma too!”
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In a Rolling Stone interview, Carson revealed why he wasn’t a fan of a new breed of women comedians, like the hilarious Elayne Boosler, a contemporary of Jay Leno and David Letterman who could go punchline-for-punchline with those late-night heavyweights.
“A woman is feminine, a woman is not abrasive, a woman is not a hustler,” Carson said. “So when you see a gal who does ‘stand-up’ one-liners, she has to overcome that built-in identification as a retiring, meek woman. I mean, if a woman comes out and starts firing one-liners, those little abrasive things, you can take that from a man. The ones that try sometimes are a little aggressive for my taste. I’ll take it from a guy, but from women, sometimes, it just doesn’t fit too well.”
Carol Wayne fit Carson’s standard and then some, if by “feminine” he meant “buxom, airheaded and flirty.” In other words, the walking punchline in a dumb blonde joke. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that comic archetype — Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield played it to hilarious advantage in the 1950s. But those characters usually had a “smarter than she looks” aspect that Carson might not have enjoyed.
Carson could turn any Wayne appearance into a boob joke. When he brought her on for an actual interview, he introduced her as a star in “the new NBC series The Girl With Something Extra … which is probably one of the great understatements of the century.”
Where did that leave comics like Boosler? Not on The Tonight Show. Talent coordinators kept telling her she was “too tough” to book. Her only chance was when guest hosts took a shot on the up-and-comer.
“The only way I got on the first time was with Helen Reddy guest hosting, and it was Totie Fields, whom I’d never even met, recommending me to Helen,” Boosler told Parade.
For young comics, that kind of appearance meant everything. “The night before my first Tonight Show, I was in a restaurant, not able to have a piece of carrot cake after my salad or I wouldn’t have the money for a tip. The night after my first Tonight Show, I was hired to tour with Helen Reddy at five thousand dollars a week.”
Carol Wayne had to settle for posing next to Art Fern.
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