A bit more on David Brenner. This was his first Tonight Show shot, allegedly (and perhaps really) his first time doing stand-up on television. The date was January 8, 1971 and they gave him an unusually long time — eight minutes. That was a long set, even back then when the program was still ninety minutes.
Someone had a lot of confidence in the guy and you can see, a few jokes in, a little twinkle in Brenner's eyes. He's doing great, he knows it and all fears of bombing and ending his career are evaporating. At the end, he hurries off the stage too fast and is many yards away when a stagehand or someone tells him that Johnny wants him to come back out and take another bow.
For a time in the seventies, this was the dream of every stand-up comic: That great Carson shot that instantly transformed you from a guy working night after night in clubs for little or no money to a comedy star, very much in demand. I'll bet you Brenner had twenty offers the next morning. It was a time when The Tonight Show had stand-up pretty much to itself, at least insofar as new comics were concerned. It stopped being that before Johnny retired.
Brenner was a regular with Carson for a long time. He guest-hosted and was at one point on the short list of potential replacements when Johnny was talking (seriously) about leaving in the mid-seventies and again in the early eighties. I don't know why but Brenner seemed to fall out of favor with Carson and the show after a while. He stopped appearing as a comic or a guest host, and they even usually left him out of those montages of Prinze, Letterman, Leno, Shandling and others who got their start or big break with Johnny. Still, he was one of the show's great success stories in that area.
Here he is, becoming a star in only eight minutes…