It’s hard to remember that such a time existed, but in the ancient days before Saturday Night Live and David Letterman came along, Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show was the coolest thing on television. Whenever I could, I would stay up late to watch it — or at least the first half hour, when Carson did his monologue and the subsequent comedy bit at his desk. The jokes were rarely funny — in fact, the funniest moments were when a joke failed to land, and Carson would do a little shame-faced soft-shoe dance — but the quality of the humor wasn’t really the point. The show’s tacit premise was that there was a late-night party going on, attended by witty and famous guests, and that we in the audience were somehow allowed to be there. We could be in on the private jokes, watch stars let their guard down and be themselves, and briefly feel like we were members of the in-crowd.

For a celebrity, appearing on the Tonight Show meant that you had really made it. When I was in college, I used to fantasize aloud about a time in the future when my roommates and I would all be booked as guests on the show on the same night — me as a world-famous mime, Krishna as a celebrated author, and Jay as… well, we weren’t sure about that… maybe as the founder of a new religion? In any case, we’d each have our few minutes of interview time and move to the couch, so by the end of the show we’d all be on stage at the same time. At that point, Carson would impishly say, “By the way, I understand that you all attended Princeton University around the same time,” to which one of us would reply, “Actually, Johnny, we were roommates.” And the studio audience would go wild, stunned by the revelation that three people who were prominent in such different fields had so unlikely a connection.

That fantasy failed to materialize, but when I visited Los Angeles for the first time in 1981, the top item on my to-do list was to attend a taping of the Tonight Show. To the bemusement of the friend I was staying with, I got up at 4:00 AM to drive to the NBC studio in Burbank to get a ticket for that night’s taping, then stood in line for hours to make sure I’d get a seat. The show had passed its prime by that time, but that didn’t keep my heart from thumping as I was ushered into the studio that I had visited so many times in my imagination.

I was already prepared for the strangeness of having familiar images take on an unfamiliar cast. Years earlier, when I was five or six years old, my parents had given in to my pleading and arranged for me to be one of the on-camera audience members on the local Bozo the Clown show. It was a horrifying experience. My mother brought me to a strange building in New York City and up in an elevator to the TV studio from which the show originated. The studio was gray and sterile, with painfully bright lights. Bozo himself, who on my home TV was small and black-and-white, was startlingly large and garishly painted, and spoke off-camera in a voice that was not Bozo’s voice at all. I was immediately afraid of him, and equally frightened by the crowd of anonymous children with whom I was seated. Throughout the live broadcast, I sat on my hard wooden bench and sulked. When, afterward, my mother asked me why I hadn’t played along with any of Bozo’s games, the only excuse I could come up with was, “I was tired.”

My attendance at the Tonight Show promised to be much more pleasant. The studio was refreshingly cool, the seat was comfortable, and I had long outgrown my fear of strangers. The only thing that bothered me, at least before the show started, was that I felt so far away from Johnny’s desk. I had a relatively good seat, but between the audience and the set was a swath of studio floor occupied by cameras and crew members. I was clearly going to get a better view by looking at the monitors mounted over our heads than by looking at the stage.

My real disappointment came when the taping began. Carson came out and did his monologue as usual, but something about it felt false. I suddenly realized why: He wasn’t addressing us, the live audience; he was playing directly to the camera. We were there only as a source of sound effects. Our job was to laugh and applaud as if we and Carson were having a fun interaction, whereas in reality there was no interaction at all. The only time I felt connected to what was happening onstage was when I looked at the monitor, where everything looked comfortable and familiar. But that was no different from watching the show on a screen at home.

I wish I could tell you that I remember who the guests were on that night’s show, but I honestly don’t. What I do remember is that Carson and each guest would have a lively and amusing chat. Then, when it was time for a commercial break, the stage lights would dim, and Johnny and the guest would sit silently in the dark to the accompaniment of Doc Severinsen’s band. They looked like animatronic figures who had been powered down for maintenance. When the break was over, the lights would come up, the human figures would come alive, and the conversation would resume as if it had been flowing all along.

By the end of the hour, I was fully awakened to the reality of what I’d seen. This was no party; it was the illusion of a party, tailored for the television screen. I felt angry at myself for having allowed myself to be deceived for so many years.

I’ve since found out that the man in the Bozo costume when I was on the show was named Bill Britten. He was very dedicated to children — not just entertaining them, but educating them. (Before and after his television career, he worked as a schoolteacher.) I sincerely regret that I trusted Johnny Carson, and didn’t trust Bozo.