This ‘SNL’ Star Claims He Was Banned From ‘The Tonight Show’ with Johnny Carson After Joking About Drunk Driving
Legendary Tonight Show host Johnny Carson wasn’t just a pioneer in the field of late-night comedy, he was also clearly at the vanguard of desperately clinging to petty grudges.
Carson famously banned a number of guests from his show, including Joan Rivers, Rich Little and singer Lola Falana, who reportedly ended up on Carson’s shit-list simply because she was friends with his mortal enemy: Wayne Newton.
Don't Miss
Weirdly enough, it turns out that Carson also had it out for Saturday Night Live’s Kevin Nealon — but not because the host had confused Nealon with Dana Carvey.
On the most recent episode of Howie Mandel Does Stuff, Nealon described a recent trip to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York, where he got to see various Carson artifacts including the “curtain from The Tonight Show” and the host’s personal rolodex, which contained notes about each comedian, including “what he liked about them, and what he didn’t like about them.”
If that piqued your curiosity, we regret to inform you that the exhibit is hosted by a holographic Jimmy Fallon.
Mandel speculated that the rolodex probably had an entry for him featuring some not-so-nice notes. “He personally banned me from the show,” Mandel said of Carson, “because he didn’t enjoy me.”
The comedian went on to explain that his final appearance on Carson’s Tonight Show was the time he showed up with a $500 sabretooth tiger prop, and used up half of his allotted time wheeling it onto the stage.
After that 1985 stunt, Mandel was only asked back for shows in which Carson was replaced by a guest host. A similar thing happened to Nealon, who never appeared on a Carson episode after making a joke that rubbed Carson the wrong way. “At the beginning of my act, it was around the holidays, and I said, ‘I’m getting ready for the holidays, I’ve been doing a lot of drinking and driving,’” Nealon recalled. “And I didn’t know he had an incident with drinking and driving.”
“I think he hurt somebody badly,” Nealon added “Maybe killed them?”
To be clear, Carson didn’t actually kill or injure anybody. But he did get arrested for a DUI in 1982. And, incidentally, he was driving his DMC DeLorean at the time — although it’s unclear if he was going 88 mph prior to being pulled over.
If he didn’t like Nealon’s inadvertent reference to his sordid past, we’re guessing that Carson would have really hated Carvey’s impression of him telling a police officer that he had one too many Strawberry Boom-Booms at the Winking Rat.
