Thought that I would write about this tonight. Losing Ed McMahon brought this point to the front of my brain and the older I get the more true I find it to be. Maybe it is a sense of growing old and losing one’s youth or maybe it is the fact that I have seen society change so drastically in my twenty some years of cultural awareness that I can’t figure out how we got there from here. It will make more sense as I write it.
(Though I do want to say I love the fact that after I mentioned at work that he had died I was asked how he died. Just once I would like to have the answer be “in a shootout with the police after a failed bank robbery attempt” or “murdered by a team of ninjas.” Much cooler way to go than just natural causes.)
I think what people forget about what it was like to be a part of Gen X growing up is that we fall into the last generation to experience an awful lot of things. We may be the first generation online and the first to experience cable as part of our youth but neither of those were ever present in our childhood years. Cable is the example that I am going to focus on here. Yes, we had cable television in our house but as opposed to today when every television in the house would be hooked up we simply had the television set in the living room connected to cable. This meant that except for those moments when you were home alone you seldom had full control over what you watched and given my huge family that was a rare moment indeed. Even sneaking out and watching late night tv was forbidden given the risk of being caught as you walked down the stairs, flipped on a switch and watched something in a room that sat directly underneath your parents’ bedroom. All of this is to say that unlike kids today I didn’t have a hundred channels in my bedroom to choose from.
Instead I often settled for a black and white set with an aerial that taught me many of the practical applications of Maxwell’s equations at a very young age. And when you are eleven or twelve, especially on a summer night, you begin to want to test the boundaries. To do things that you know that you aren’t supposed to do just to see what they are like. Nothing horrible (at least not in my case) but something that gives you a sense of having complete control of your life is like. For me that was staying up late to watch the Tonight Show.
I really would stay up late, turn the lights off in my room so my parents wouldn’t notice, and watch the show. It just seemed so adult to me. Almost forbidden in a way that I didn’t quite understand. I knew why I wasn’t supposed to watch Benny Hill due to the horrors of seeing women run around in their underwear. That wasn’t the case with Carson but you knew that there was something there that you weren’t supposed to see. It was like sneaking into an uncle’s poker game without anyone noticing.
That is what Carson and McMahon were at their best: your favorite uncles. Johnny was the kind and inquisitive one with a refined but ribald sense of humor while Ed was the lovable drunkard who laughed at everything. They could make it seem as though if all the cameras were turned off they would spend their evening doing the exact same performance for themselves. And there always was that slight sense of danger. Carson was the master of the literate entendre. It was only risqué if you were smart enough to notice.
I tolerated Ed on TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. While I never won anything from Publisher’s Clearing House I applaud him for his effort to get people to buy magazines. I can even forgive him for unleashing Sinbad onto the world as a result of Star Search. I just wish that I could once more get that thrill of staying up late and watching something I wasn’t supposed to. I don’t think kids today experience that. Partly due to Leno being too tame (Conan and Dave are a bit more on the edge) but more because they have the world at their fingertips. They become desensitized too quickly and I think that takes the wonder out of life. Sometimes life is better when things are simpler.
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