Do You Trust Your Wife

I remember watching this show in the afternoons, and some of the contestants made the chief kooks and bottle washers on Groucho's show look positively sane by comparison. My personal favorite is the guy who took air baths; he would lie down in front of an open window, let the breeze waft over him until he felt clean, then turn over and do the same thing to the other side. Johnny sniffed the air suspiciously, then asked, "And I suppose if you want to take a shower you use a fan?". My second favorite is a trumpeter who was hired by his local zoo to play music to get the alligators to mate. He did his job too well; he was fired after one day because the alligators were responding to the music. Carson: "What did you play them, 'Stimulator Alligator'?" (a play on Bill Haley's "See You Later, Alligator"). Also, unlike Groucho, Johnny was willing to take part in demonstrations of the contestants' interests, be it fencing, model-car racing, or scuba diving, all of which he did with varying degrees of success.

The prize money wasn't much: three questions worth $25, $50, and $75, and when I watched it in the later years the highest-scoring couple got to unscramble a name or phrase for, I believe, $500. But who cared? Try to avoid the last fifteen months, after Carson went to "The Tonight Show". Woody Woodbury tries too hard to be naughty, and his standard fishing-gear attire won't make any more sense now than it did then. And by the way, Bill Nimmo returned as the show's announcer; Del Sharbutt appears to have been an interim announcer between the time Nimmo originally left in 1958 and Ed McMahon joined the show.