How ‘The Shining’s ‘Here’s Johnny’ Became Comedy Gold
In the dead of winter, snowed in at the vacant Overlook Hotel in the Rocky Mountains, frustrated writer Jack Torrance has snapped. Wielding an axe, Torrance corners his own wife and child in a bathroom. His son manages to escape through a small window, but Wendy Torrance is locked inside the room, scared for her life. Suddenly, the head of an axe comes bursting through the locked door. Then, Wendy’s deranged husband shoves his face into the hole as he grins and shouts, “Here’s Johnny!”
This scene from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance and Shelley Duvall as Wendy, is widely considered to be one of the most terrifying moments in the history of film. And yet, it’s been imitated and parodied for laughs in dozens of comedies — from adult shows like Community and The Simpsons to children’s shows like Tiny Toons and Johnny Bravo.
So what, exactly, makes this vicious scene about a murderous father so ripe for parody? And could it have anything to do with the fact that “Here’s Johnny!” was born out of comedy in the first place?
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Well before The Shining’s release in 1980, fans of The Tonight Show would hear “Here’s Johnny!” at the beginning of every episode. The booming voice of announcer Ed McMahon would drag out the “Here’s” in glorious fashion before even getting around to “Johnny.” Next, the beloved Johnny Carson would stroll out from behind his rainbow-colored curtain to greet his audience.
As Mark Malkoff, host of The Carson Podcast and Inside Late Night explains, McMahon gave us his first “Here’s Johnny!” on October 2, 1962, Carson’s second night hosting the show. “It was just a two- or three-second ‘Here’s Johnny,’” Malkoff explains. “But over the first year or two it elongated until it was something like seven seconds. It happened very organically.”
Throughout the 1970s especially, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was an American institution unlike any modern talk show. So when Nicholson uttered the line with his head through the door, audiences immediately got the reference.
The Shining was one of the biggest movies of 1980, and the bathroom scene quickly became a popular reference point. One of the earliest references actually appeared on The Tonight Show itself. As Malkoff points out, The Shining came out in May, and in September, The Tonight Show used that “Here’s Johnny” clip with Nicholson to open its anniversary show. The scene was also spoofed in the sitcom Three’s Company and in magazines like Mad and Cracked.
But the parodies really picked up steam in the 1990s, when those two little words were mocked in cartoons like Doug, Johnny Bravo, Hey Arnold! and Tiny Toon Adventures. The Simpsons also did a masterful impression of the moment in the “Treehouse of Horror” episode in 1990. The 2000s saw “Here’s Johnny!” references in Finding Nemo and in TV shows like Duck Dodgers, That’s So Raven and The King of Queens. And by the 2010s, “Here’s Johnny!” cropped up in Community, Bob’s Burgers, Futurama and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Notably, the 2019 film It: Chapter Two, which is also based on a Stephen King novel, pays visual reference to it.
As for our current decade, Jurassic World Dominion referenced the scene with a raptor in place of Nicholson, and in 2020, Bryan Cranston starred in a Mountain Dew Super Bowl ad that directly mirrored the scene. All the while, Know Your Meme Editor-in-Chief Don Caldwell notes that “Here’s Johnny!” has certainly built its own presence online, and in myriad ways. “This was a huge thing in pop culture first. Then, when the internet comes around, it was latched onto in various forms including memes, reenactments, video parodies and remix videos,” he explains.
As to why these parodies have been so pervasive over the last 45 years, Bob Kushell, the man who wrote the most infamous one (The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror V”), believes we have to look at the convergence of superlatives in the movie. “Of the hundreds of truly iconic moments in movie history, only a few capture everything cinema can be,” Kushell argues. “You’ve got Stanley Kubrick — one of the greatest directors of all time — framing a close-up of Jack Nicholson — one of our greatest actors — axing through a bathroom door to reach a screaming Shelley Duvall. Then, he delivers one of the silliest, most wickedly comical lines ever uttered by a homicidal maniac. And it’s a reference to one of the greatest television comedians of all time. That one moment is horror, comedy, film history and pop culture rolled into a single swing of an axe.”
Probably the most impressive thing about the original moment in the film is that the line “Here’s Johnny!” appears nowhere in King’s original novel or in the screenplay written by Kubrick and Diane Johnson. The line was an ad-lib by Nicholson. “I like to think that ‘Here’s Johnny!’ is the sort of magic Kubrick was hoping for when asking his cast and crew to do the record-setting number of takes he’s famous for,” says Rodney Ascher, the writer and director of the film Room 237, which examines theories surrounding hidden meanings and messages in The Shining.
Movie magic it was. The scene is listed in countless “Top 100 Movie Moments”-type articles from the American Film Institute, IGN and other entertainment publications. This also helps to explain how “Here’s Johnny” became so ripe for parody. Just like “Rosebud” from Citizen Kane and Neo dodging the bullets in The Matrix, “Here’s Johnny” is so singularly special that it’s become a cultural touchstone.
However, there’s something else unique about the scene that separates it from other such iconic movie moments. “In the film, a lot of Jack’s sarcastic jabs are aimed not at Wendy or Danny, who are present with him, but a live-in-the-studio audience, imagining himself as the star of another type of show, one that’s brave enough to get real,” explains Ascher. “He’s certainly suffering from Main Character Syndrome, but also he thinks he’s in a rags-to-riches story and doesn’t realize he’s in a descent-into-madness horror show. That disconnect may be why, depending on who’s watching it and when, The Shining sometimes plays as a dark comedy.”
Essentially, part of why “Here’s Johnny!” is such a pervasive comedic reference point — even surpassing its original reference point of The Tonight Show — is that, as horrifying as that bathroom moment is, it’s also pretty damn funny.
