Carson's Comedy Classics

Carson's Comedy Classics was a stripped 1/2 hour syndicated television show that was first released to U.S. television stations in 1983.

The program was made from segments and sketches taken from the first 20 years of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Johnny Carson's full tenure on the program, which originally aired on the NBC Television Network, was from 1962 to 1992. The series is narrated by Ed McMahon, who, as a voiceover, introduces the program and each of the segments.

When Carson would have his annual Tonight Show Anniversary Show in prime time on NBC, the anniversary shows were mainly flashback clip shows, and it was usually the same vintage sketches which got the showcase on the shows, but Carson's Comedy Classics show that there were many classic sketches and segments that have never been seen since the original airing that had at least still existed by 1982-1983, and many of the sketches and segments in Carson's Comedy Classics have never been released on DVD either. Another note about the anniversary shows is that the popularity of them were probably the catalyst which spearheaded the creation of Carson's Comedy Classics, which is essentially a classic clip show edited down to a half an hour.