Johnny Carson Loved Shari Lewis’s Dirtiest Puppet
If you’ve ever shoved your fist inside a sock and pretended it was your best friend, you probably owe a debt to Shari Lewis, the entertainer who created sassy stocking Lambchop. Lewis invented the six-year-old sheep for the Captain Kangaroo show all the way back in 1956. Adults were charmed by Lambchop and other Lewis creations like Charlie Horse, Hush Puppy and Wing Ding — the ventriloquist and her felt friends were staples on programs like The Ed Sullivan Show. Lewis’s own children’s show earned her a Peabody Award.
Conspicuously absent from accounts of Lewis’s menagerie was a puppet by the name of Billy Goatee. The character made Tonight Show history by being the only voice during Johnny Carson’s New York tenure to get bleeped by the network, according to Mark Malkoff’s Love Johnny Carson: One Obsessive Fan's Journey to Find the Genius Behind the Legend.
The 1966 interview began innocently enough, with Lewis answering Johnny’s questions directly. Soon, shy Lambchop joined the conversation. According to Love Johnny Carson, the “exchange was sweet and heartfelt.”
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But then Lewis played a wild card, a stunt I can’t find evidence of ever happening again on television. She brought out a second puppet — not Charlie Horse or Hush Puppy, but a new character named Billy Goatee. “He’s obscene,” Lewis told Carson. “He can’t help it. He’s a dirty old man.”
Ha ha ha, very funny, Shari Lewis. But the children’s entertainer wasn’t joking — Billy Goatee had a filthy mouth. The actual profanities are lost to history, but the swears were wanton enough that the censors had to hit the bleep button. Three times.
The goat was so raunchy that local newspapers picked up the story. The Levittown Courier Times reported that the Carson appearance allowed Lewis to shake her kiddie-act image, “which clung as tightly as her dresses do now.” It was all part of Lewis’s plan to graduate to a Vegas nightclub act, a career path that presumably paid more and offered more opportunities than Captain Kangaroo.
Even Lambchop got a naughty new persona. In the Vegas act, the sock would down martinis and slur her words. “What’s wrong with you?” Lewis would ask.
“I’m an alcoholic,” Lambchop belched back.
Whew! “When Shari changes an image,” said the July 30, 1966 edition of La Crosse Tribune, “she really changes.”
Levittown Courier Times reported on another forgotten Lewis creation who appeared with Johnny. “We got 160 letters about a drunken rabbit named Hop Scotch,” Lewis said. “He’s pink and says things like, ‘Don’t put a pinko label on me. Sure, I took the fifth but it was all Scotch.” Apparently, Lambchop was a bad influence.
Was Carson mad that the censors had to intervene when Billy Goatee got bawdy? On the contrary, according to Malkoff. “Johnny couldn’t have been more pleased.”