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segment, to let the audience judge for itself, but he was denied. That night he addressed his audience. He’d spent a sleepless night, he said, “wrestling with my conscience,” and he’d decided to quit The Tonight Show. Like Fred Allen on radio, who once had to defend a joke about a woman who could have found a better husband in a cemetery (the S&P man felt the quip might offend cemetery caretakers), Paar was exasperated by the seemingly constant struggle with his own company’s watchdogs. “There must be a better way of making a living than this,” he said. NBC, he said, had been wonderful to him, “but they let me down.” With that, Paar walked offstage, leaving his flummoxed sidekick, Hugh Downs, to improvise the rest of the show.

Less than a month later, Paar returned to the show without missing a beat. “As I was saying . . . ,” he said as he began his monologue.

Burns and Carlin were enamored of Paar—his wit, his morality, and the genuine appreciation for comic risk-taking he shared with both his predecessor, Steve Allen, and his successor, Carson. Their choice of material for their first shot at the show was serendipitous. They’d been doing impersonations of NBC’s nightly news team, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, for some time. More recently, they’d added Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy—both men having just been nominated by their respective parties to run for the presidency—to their growing repertoire of public figures. At first it was Burns, the Bostonian, who did Kennedy, with Carlin taking on Nixon, hunching his shoulders and puffing his cheeks, as dozens of comics would do in the 1970s. They soon switched, however, when it became apparent to both men that Carlin’s version of JFK was even more accurate, and funnier, than Burns’s.

As young, blithe, and matter-of-fact about their rapid ascent as they were, Carlin’s stomach churned during the audition. After being told they’d earned a spot on an upcoming show, the elated trio of Burns, Carlin, and Becker discussed their plans as they rode the elevator from Studio 6B down to ground level at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Burns had something to attend to at home in Boston; he was headed out of town to thumb a ride up I-95. Becker was going to stop in the office of the network’s legal department to fill out some paperwork. Gesturing in succession to his two young funnymen, he barked out their respective marching orders: “You go to Boston. You take a shit. I’ll go to the legal department.” It was a moment about which Burns and Carlin would never tire of reminding each other.

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ATTRACTING ATTENTION

It seemed too good to be true. Less than a year after fantasizing about it, Burns and Carlin were about to appear on The Tonight Show.

Maybe it was too good to be true. As it happened, Paar wasn’t hosting the night they were scheduled. The guest host was Arlene Francis, whose work on a pioneering daytime women’s show called Home led Newsweek to call her “the first lady of television.” Bob Shanks, then a young talent coordinator and writer on The Tonight Show, figures Paar must not have been eager to have the act on his show. The guest hosts typically got the B-list, he says.

Shelly Schultz was the GAC agent booking television appearances, introducing new talent such as Phyllis Diller, whom Paar loved. He has another theory—that the show’s writers slotted Burns and Carlin on a night when Francis was the guest host to shake up a dull program. Francis, Schultz recalls, “was deadly. They would have put them on to give the show a lift.” The Tonight Show writers, he says, were reluctant to book untested comic acts on nights when Paar was hosting, because the host could be brutal. “They put up a big grid a couple weeks ahead of time,” recalls the former agent, who worked for The Tonight Show from 1962 until 1970. “They listed all the people who were submitted for those days, and they tried to put together a show that would be cohesive. They were all scared shitless of putting comedy on, because Paar was allegedly a comedian. . . . Paar was very hands-on,