Steve: Yeah, that’s it. First of all, it was new to the audience. They hadn’t seen it fifty-seven times. Whereas now—in a talk show or a comedy talk show setting, it’s really quite difficult to do anything totally unlike stuff that’s been done before. It’s not that I’m so much more creative than any of the other guys. It’s just that I had the good fortune to do it first. But at the moment, I can’t think of any feature of those shows which was not originated on one of our early shows.
Judd: Right now, most shows on TV are formulized. Johnny Carson comes on, does his monologue, does a skit or his little thing, and interviews three people. There’s nothing like what you were doing. Do you think they could reproduce what you did today?
Steve: I don’t think most people could, no. I don’t say that in any conceited sense. It’s just that I prefer to work loose. In the case of Johnny, it’s hard to criticize him personally on this, because he’s been there for twenty years. Why should he bother to be inventive now? It’d be as pointless as Bob Hope suddenly doing inventive things. It could hurt them, you know. But it would drive me nuts to do the same thing every night. I’m not saying I’m better or worse than they are, it’s just that I don’t work that way. For my own piece of mind, I had to do new stuff every night, and I learned very early in my career, even before I was working in television, that the biggest laughs in show business, for me, came the same way the biggest laughs in reality do: out of whatever the reality of a given exchange of a social situation is. One example that pops into my mind was back—oh, when was it? Forty-eight, let’s say. In addition to a regular late-night comedy and talk show I was doing in L.A., I was doing some evening network things for the CBS Radio Network. And right in the middle of a live show one evening, there was an ungodly noise, an annoying noise, just behind some closed doors at the back of the stage. And I knew it could be heard all around the country. I mean, what was this (loud whisper voice) “chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck-a-chuhhh…”? We had to stop everything and—you know, we were on the air live so we couldn’t say, “Stop tape.” So I just did what I think was the sensible thing. I didn’t do it because it was funny, I did it because it was sensible. I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, um, obviously those of you at home can hear this annoying distraction in the background here. I don’t know what it is and—” I said, “Do any of you know?” And nobody on the stage knew, so I said, “Well, let’s find out.” So I took the mike with the long wire on it. And we had somebody open the doors, and there was an old man, an old Italian gentleman—or with an Italian accent, I should say—who was using a cement mixer, a small portable cement mixer outside those doors. To this day, he does not know he was on the air for ten minutes. I went in and whistled and screamed at him to, you know, turn it off. So he finally got the point, and turned it off. And then I asked him, I said, “What are you doing here?” And he said, “I lay the cement, you know.” And we talked and had a lot of laughs and he—I don’t know if he could hear the people laughing in the other room or not, I don’t remember anything I said to him. But it was just funny, live on the air, with maybe nineteen million people listening all over America. That’s not one of the great moments in the history of comedy, but the point is it’s an example of looseness. I think everybody ought to do that.
Judd: One of the things you originated was talking with the audience at the beginning of your show, which they do on other shows now. How did that come about?
Steve: I didn’t originate taking a hand mic into the audience. There were noncomic fellows who did that before me. Notably Tom Breneman and a fellow named Don McNeill. They were very popular on the radio in the mid-1940s chiefly. They were sort of genial masters of ceremonies. And sometimes Art Linkletter would go into the audience with some specific gimmick in mind. Like, let’s see who has the most outlandish thing in her purse. “All right, madam, will you stand up and open your purse? Oh, look here, it’s a dead mouse,” or whatever, you know. Except that’s a funny joke. They wouldn’t say that. They would just talk about whatever was really in the purse, and “Thank you, here’s fifty dollars” and sit down. So they had done that before. But I was the first comedian to do it.
Judd: And you had regular audience members that were there all the time.
Steve: I don’t know how that came about. I guess it was just that they were lonely people who had nothing much else in their lives and they could go to this party every night and have a few laughs and be given some recognition. I used to love to talk to the regulars, as they were called, on the old Tonight Show. The classic instance of this, which people over fifty still remember, was a woman named Mrs. Sterling. She was what we would call a bag lady. She usually had a couple of big paper bags with her, and she dressed quite poorly. She usually wore a man’s khaki army overcoat and tennis shoes. And she was in our audience every night. And I don’t think I ever saw her laugh at anything. It was all very serious for her. But you know, she would be given attention. Her motivation, chiefly, was greed. Because at the end of the interviews we used to give away prizes, toasters or a pair of silk stockings or salami or something. At the time one of my sponsors was Polaroid cameras. She never could get the name straight. I would interview her; the interviews were very much the same. She didn’t seem to hear my questions very well. But she knew that if she could get to talk to me at all, she was good for a toaster or a fan or a deep-fry pot or something. She must’ve had a room full of all these things. Probably sold them out on the street after the show. So she would resort to flattery. I’d say, “Good evening, Mrs. Sterling.” She’d say, “Mr. Allen, you’re wonderful.” I’d say, “Well, the degree of my wonderfulness is irrelevant, but how have you been?” And she’d say, “Oh, we love ya. Everybody loves you, you’re great, Mr. Allen. Give me one of them Palmeroid cameras.” She always called them Palmeroids. And she never knew why the audience was hysterical. I never even had to do jokes. I just turned around and it was funny. So, she was like a known quantity. I knew that I would get laughs if I talked to her, so I talked to her practically every time I went into the audience.
Judd: Didn’t you turn one of your audience members into a movie reviewer?
Steve: His name was John Fisher. He was—I guess now we would call him a hyperkinetic personality. He talked sort of uncontrollably fast and effusively. He was an upstate farmer type. And I asked him one question when I first met him one night. It was something like, “Hello, sir, what’s your name?” And most people say, you know, “Charlie Feldman,” and just hang there. Which is really more sensible, because I only ask that, I didn’t ask for their serial number, you know. And he gave me about a nine-minute answer. He just couldn’t stop his mouth. “I’m John Fisher, and I live up in Solo, New York, and I have a potato farm up there and I just come to talk, because I seen the movies, the one with Clark Gable and Myrna Loy.” And he sort of reviewed the whole movie for us. Obviously that’s hysterically funny and I have nothing to do with it. He’s the one that’s getting the screams, did not know why he was getting laughs. So when he finally shut up, I said, “Well, John, that was a very interesting movie review, would you like to come back and join us from time to time?” He said, “Yeah, sure,” and gave me another six-minute answer. So we signed him up and we would get tickets to the new movies and he would go see them and come in and give us these dumb reviews of them. You know—it’s funny. And he never knew why it was funny.