Johnny Carson Taught Me How to Teach
My grad school courses sure didn’t.
Everything I know about teaching I learned from Johnny Carson.
It’s true. Johnny’s ease in front of a crowd, his self-deprecating humor, his unflappable attitude when things went wrong — they made him the best at what he did. As host of the Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992, he became the quintessential late-night talk show host.
His qualities onstage are the very things that will serve you well if you’re trying to teach a room full of college students, whether you’ve got 20 of them or 150. Those things will also work well for any type of public speaking, although some situations require a little more structure than what I’m about to describe.
Be your own judge. Use what you can, and leave the rest.
My parents gave up having a bedtime for me when I was about eight because I just couldn’t go to sleep. So from 1968 or so I started staying up through the 10:00 news and into the Tonight Show. The show was ninety minutes long then, and I usually didn’t make it to the end. But I certainly made it through the monologue, Johnny’s sketches, and the first guest.
Thirty years later I got my first gig as a history professor. I was at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater finishing my Ph.D., and the history…
