Johnny Carson Exposed and Embarrassed a Famous ‘Psychic’ on National TV
Before Johnny Carson was a comedian, he was The Great Carsoni, the 14-year-old magician who entertained youthful audiences in Nebraska for $3 a show. While he ultimately took a different route into show business, he maintained a lifelong interest in magic and how illusionists performed their tricks.
But there was a big difference between magicians and so-called psychics, a new breed of entertainer becoming popular in the 1970s. In Carson’s opinion, many of those so-called clairvoyants were simply recreating magicians’ tricks. Instead of presenting the craft as an artful illusion, psychics were claiming actual superhuman abilities and charging big money for their services.
Uri Geller, an Israeli-British personality, was Exhibit A. In the 1970s, Geller became a popular talk-show guest who’d perform demonstrations of what he claimed to be psychokinesis, dowsing and telepathy. His biggest trick, which he called “the Geller effect,” was his ability to bend metal objects, like spoons, with his mind.
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Carson was willing to have Geller as a guest, but if he claimed to be truly psychic, he should pass an actual test of his abilities. Carson enlisted the help of the Amazing Randi, another illusionist who had developed a side hustle exposing frauds who claimed to have supernatural powers. (Randi would make debunking Geller’s abilities a second job for years.)
Geller and his team provided The Tonight Show with a set of props for the appearance, in which he’d use the eerie power of his mind to buckle spoons and perform other amazing feats. Rightly suspecting that the real power lay in the trick props, Carson enlisted Randi to provide an alternate set of materials. Geller wasn’t allowed anywhere near the new props until he sat next to Carson on live television.
What followed was 20 of the cringiest minutes in late-night history. The look on Geller’s face when he saw the replacement spoons gave it away — he was about to be exposed as a fraud. “This scares me,” he admitted, pointing to the tray of objects he knew he couldn’t move with his mind. He offered up stalls, rationalizations and alibis, claiming that the mood wasn’t right, that “I don’t feel strong” or that Carson was pressing him too hard.
The New York Times Magazine called the Tonight Show segment “a legendary immolation, in which Geller offered up flustered excuses to his host as his abilities failed him again and again.”
Geller knew the gig was up. “I sat there for 22 minutes, humiliated,” he said. “I went back to my hotel, devastated. I was about to pack up the next day and go back to Tel Aviv. I thought, ‘That’s it — I’m destroyed.’”
But a funny thing happened after Geller’s Tonight Show appearance. His failure made such a splash that he was immediately booked on Merv Griffin and other talk shows. People who wanted to believe in paranormal phenomena talked themselves into Geller’s failure as proof that he was psychic. If it were all a trick, they reasoned, Geller would have just done it. Defeat somehow made him more legitimate than ever.
Ironically, he said, “That Johnny Carson show made Uri Geller.”
