And those darn hyenas, I all of a sudden heard them after they had gotten the hide down somehow. And then they drag it and run away with it. And that’s when you hear the cackle, which is called the laugh of a hyena, is the cackling when they have… Read More
I won’t be. I won’t take advantage of that, and talk about several humans I’ve known. But I know what you’re saying. I’ll tell you what, I have been so involved and so totally impressed with the life forms on the planet. I don’t necessarily show fear of something, but… Read More
I know how to act around a wild gorilla and I know how to act with a big snake and all those other things. But I must have say there’s one animal that gets under my skin a little bit. Hyenas are very strange animals. They’re extremely mysterious. I’ve been… Read More
And then a little bit later, half an hour later, I heard the call much closer. So I knew they were checking out my campsite. And the call is very interesting. I would like to imitate that call, because it’s a haunting sound that you’ll never forget. It starts very… Read More
I’m sitting here and Johnny would take the grapes and start eating them. Then he would offer them to Doc and then he’d take them away and put them in his mouth. And Johnny started making faces. He started chewing the grapes, spitting them out. Doc was just about to… Read More
About the few months after he stopped doing the show, he wanted to get reacquainted with his family. So his wife and his two sons, we all went to Africa to Tanzania. And around the table in the evening, (laughs) John is very private person and he doesn’t talk just… Read More
Now, speaking of wild animals, are there any animals that you are fearful of?… Read More
He was kicking the chairs off the table, doing a war dance on the table and jumping up and down and making a lot of noise. He was something else. So Johnny came over and he started staring at Doc, put his head down, and all of a sudden I… Read More
And I thought, this is not gonna work. I said, this is gonna be trouble to myself and I jumped to the left. Doc, came through the air and clipped Carson in the face. And Johnny said a couple of expletives. And he said that blank, blank, blank hit me. Read More
If I had had eye contact with Doc, the Celebes ape. He was on my lap. I had to force myself not to look at it. If I had an eye contact, he could have gone from my throat. So Johnny found some grapes. This is the end of the… Read More
Oh, yeah. There was one time, a lot of embarrassing moments. Johnny was so quick. I had a Celebes ape on named Doc. And a Celebes ape is one of the, from a human standpoint, anthropomorphically is one of the worst looking animals around. They are black with a mohawk… Read More
They were sort of worshiped. Anyway, Doc was sitting on my hands with his back to me and I knew the trainer. I’d met Doc once before, but I knew he was fairly young animal at that time. And he stood about that tall and he had this incredible grimace. Read More
And then he said, “Yeah, Jimmy.” He said, “Doc is so bad now with other males “that I tried to castrate him, “but I didn’t have time.” And then they said, “Here’s Jim Fowler.” So I had to go out with Doc. And I knew that I wasn’t gonna put… Read More
And they were really into it. So I knew it was big successful. And I started realizing that Johnny Carson like a good book or a television show or anything else, it was a spontaneous things that happened that were unpredictable. And it was surprising. I have a collection of… Read More
And all of a sudden there were four little wolf puppies, all pulling as hard as they could with his chicken neck in the middle. And the people loved it because it was unpredictable, and they noticed that the little wolf puppies are very competitive. Yeah, but that’s sort of… Read More
But yeah, (laughs) I was just gonna say that he was so quick I had to eliminate and start listening to the audience in the distance. I didn’t pay attention to the audience. I was a straight man for Johnny. Read More
Do you have any embarrassing moments?… Read More
And then they started figuring out what did these kids learn?… Read More
You know what they learned?… Read More
They learned that I enjoyed working with animals and it looked like it was fun and it was exciting. And that’s one of the things that those kids went away with. It wasn’t all the knowledge and the things I was saying, it’s how I acted with the animals and… Read More