WHILE READING of the late television maverick Jack Paar in the January obituaries, I became curious about his work. Reputed to be smart and entertaining at the same time, he was also a bit of a puzzle: During the height of his fame–when he was on television, with two succeeding programs, from 1957 to 1965–the whole country is said to have wondered, “What is Jack Paar really like?”
I was especially intrigued by the story of him quitting on live television as host of The Tonight Show, after the studio killed one of his jokes because it made reference to a water closet. He looked straight into the camera and said, “I am leaving The Tonight Show. There must be a better way of making a living than this.” Even more intriguing was the story of his return to the show a few weeks later. His first words back were “As I was saying before I was interrupted . . .”
Hailed as the inventor of the late-night format, Jack Paar was cited by no less a television authority than Marshall McLuhan as the embodiment of what was cool about this cool medium. “The forms of entertainment that work best on television, whether it’s Paddy Chayefsky or even The Paar Show, are ones which admit of a great deal of casualness,” the elliptical McLuhan said in an interview republished in a new collection of his work.
And yet, when Paar is mentioned today, the word casual does not come to mind. Everyone’s well-dressed on the show. Suits and ties all around. Rather, it is for his sophistication that Paar is celebrated these days, in particular his wit, which as Florence King teaches, is aristocratic in nature.
FOR A SAMPLE OF HIS STUFF, I checked out The Jack Paar Collection, a 3 DVD set from the Shout! Factory, mainly because it promised whole episodes. Greatest moments collections don’t really interest me because–like those best one-liners pages at the end of some editions of Shakespeare–there is no sense of context, of how the public that chose to celebrate this person and their work came to know them. I also bought the still-funny I Kid You Not, Paar’s 1959 book (“a minority report on what I’m really like”), which he wrote with John Reddy.
The best material on the DVDs falls into two broad categories: Jack Paar and Jonathan Winters. Unlike, say, I Kid You Not, which aims hard at a minimum quota of one joke per paragraph in a pretty obvious manner, Paar’s monologues constantly lull one into the expectation that what he is about to say is not a joke, but an observation on life and whatnot.
For example, one monologue opens with Paar mentioning that he saw on the sidewalk a very sincere-looking man carrying a sign that says “The End is Near.” And Paar makes clear that, however sorry one might feel for such people, he’s always a little moved by the sight of real conviction. Anyway the apocalyptic sidewalk guy approaches Paar and asks him if he knows where he is spending eternity. Paar doesn’t have an answer for the poor fellow, until now, and he hopes the guy is watching. “Where will you spend eternity?” Paar repeats the question. “I’m going to spend it with most of you on the Long Island Expressway.”
Much of Paar’s best material (on these DVDs anyway) is comprised of riffs on everyday experience (the overpaid television repairman, encounters with toll-booth operators, what’s in the news) or evergreen one-liners (“We have a wonderful show coming up for you,” Paar says in an introductory monologue, “I don’t know the exact date, but one of these days . . .”). But the signature material is slightly neurotic. Like Woody Allen, a favorite comic of Paar’s and a frequent guest on his show (including a fantastic appearance included in the collection), Paar is a particularly skilled narrator of his own everyday uncertainties, the low-key existential quandaries of an active mind when it is engaged with nothing significant.
He’s been wondering about Princess Radziwill, Jackie O’s sister, he says in one monologue. Of what country, he asks, is she a princess? Turns out the answer is Poland, but, Paar complains, Poland has been a republic for 40 years and Princess Radziwill is only 30 years old. In another gag, Paar is struggling through an uneven series of jokes all framed as “Why is it that . . .” questions. Losing track of the time, he asks someone offstage how long he’s been going. “I don’t know Jack,” comes the answer, “but it seems like forever.”
The best two segments of the DVD collection, however, are a Jonathan Winters performance and, running a close second, a conversation on the couch with Jonathan Winters hijacked by Jonathan Winters doing a JFK imitation. In the performance, Winters (best known among younger folks for his turn as Mork’s baby on Mork and Mindy) reinterprets Moby Dick. Ahab becomes Arnold, a flaming mama’s boy who has brought his nagging mother to sea with him as he hunts the great white whale. But the performance is much more than a cute premise. In the transformation of this smiley, mild-mannered, young comic in suit and tie into a series of characters, one can see decades of comedy to come and the entire culture pivoting with one subversive and brilliant performance.
PAAR SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN particularly proud of his interviews, but the ones included here, though good, do not suggest greatness. However they succeed at making one nostalgic for a time when the A-List of interview “gets” included a few politicians (JFK, Bobby Kennedy, briefly after his brother’s assassination, Richard Nixon, and Barry Goldwater, who is especially good) and when those politicians unanimously spoke with great pride of American might and America’s example to the world. One finds here none of the self-loathing encountered daily in our post-Cold War struggle to define the enemy and defeat him; anti-Communists all, the politicians on these DVDs disagreed merely about the exact degree of danger posed by the Russians, with only the Republican Richard Nixon putting in a good word for Khruschev.
Tom Shales, TV critic of the Washington Post, does much to round out the commentary on the first DVD, and seems to capture the tone of The Paar Show when he says it had “the edge of journalism and the sparkle of show business.” But what I find most compelling about the material in this collection is the example it provides of an amusing popular culture for adults, one that is neither weighed down and ponderous like The Charlie Rose Show, which tends to treat mundane accomplishments as profoundly meaningful, nor frivolous and captive to the celebrity industry like so many other shows and magazines. Jack Paar’s shows, this complete non-expert on the subject found, appealed to more than a couple aspects of one’s personality. And though his shows were not high culture by any measure, he never lowballed the intelligence or maturity of his audience. In retrospect, this achievement seems almost as great as the spontaneous and self-conscious humor that made Jack Paar famous.
David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
