bleungberg.com

Bleungberg was far too young to have ever watched Ed McMahon in action on ‘The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson’, and whose death was announced yesterday.

However, we have seen every episode of the peerless HBO series, ‘The Larry Sanders Show’, which mercilessly lampooned ‘The Tonight Show’ during its six-year run, and the roles of Carson and McMahon were played superbly by Garry Shandling and Jeffrey Tambor respectively.

Shandling, who had previously guest-hosted on ‘The Tonight Show’, had the benefit of having seen the action from an insider’s point of view, and would certainly have been influential in deciding how to portray the sidekick character of Hank as hapless, insecure and deeply unpleasant.

Central to the show’s theme was the long-running feud and deep jealousy between Larry and Hank - mirroring the real-life behind-the-scene struggle between Carson and McMahon.

But Bleungberg had no idea until watching McMahon’s obituary last night on the NBC Nightly News that some of the more outlandish elements in Hank’s character genuinely happened with McMahon - from being the constant butt of jokes, to hosting charity telethons and minor beauty contests, as well as numerous (tacky) commercial endorsements, and incredibly, McMahon’s bankruptcy which was also written into the storyline some ten years before it actually happened to McMahon!

The two most outstanding episodes in ‘Larry Sanders’ were ‘Hank’s night in the Sun’ and ‘Hank’s sex tape’.

We don’t know if McMahon ever hosted ‘The Tonight Show’ in Carson’s absence (Hank did - and he bombed), nor do we know whether McMahon had had ‘lots of pussies’ (Hank once spent a week with a prostitute in a hotel room to cure his depression, and had filmed a threesome with a couple of whores on his birthday).

All we’d imagine is that McMahon must have cringed at Hank’s depiction of him, and probably resented the negative portrayal.

We also doubt that McMahon had had a happy life. His final years certainly weren’t nice: ill-health, a bitter divorce and bankruptcy which bizarrely led to Donald Trump coming to his rescue in the face of being evicted from his Beverly Hills home.

However, we reckon he would have been pleased to have outlived Carson, and in all his obituaries, is no longer regarded as a ’second-fiddle’ but as a ‘national icon’ in his own right.

McMahon and his ego would have been pleased with that.