How Arsenio Hall Shook Up Late Night
There’s a scene in “Pretty Woman” in which Julia Roberts, as Vivian, a sex worker hired by a “corporate raider” played by Richard Gere, attends a polo match dressed in a demure polka-dot sundress and a boater hat. She almost blends in—until a player makes an impressive shot and she starts pumping her fist, chanting, “Woof! Woof! Woof!” Moviegoers in 1990 would have clocked the reference: Vivian was tuned in to “The Arsenio Hall Show.” Its host, the eponymous Black comedian, would make his entrance as a rowdy section of his audience called the “dog pound” barked on cue.
“The Arsenio Hall Show” premièred on January 3, 1989, and in the course of the next six seasons became the epicenter of early-nineties cool; even the logo had color blocking. Hall wore flashy suits and streetwear and eschewed the traditional host’s desk in order to sit closer to his guests, even if it meant risking a contact high from a seemingly stoned Tupac Shakur. The show had the energy, and the soundtrack, of a night club. With musical guests such as A Tribe Called Quest and Salt-N-Pepa, it was the unofficial late-night home of hip-hop. When Fred Rogers, of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” came on, Hall gifted him a colorful leather jacket to match his own and exclaimed, “This gives new meaning to boys in the hood!”
The biggest names of the nineties stopped by to earn street cred: Tom Cruise appeared to promote “Interview with the Vampire”—and to dap Hall. In 1992, the Presidential hopeful Bill Clinton joined the show’s band to play “Heartbreak Hotel” on the saxophone; afterward, he joked with Hall about having smoked pot, claiming that he really did try to inhale.
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Hall’s interview style was loose and bawdy, part of a countercultural posture—embodied by musicians like Prince and Madonna (of assless pants and cone-bra infamy, respectively)—that rejected the sexual puritanism sparked by the AIDS crisis. In 1991, the singer Sinéad O’Connor appeared on Hall’s show after boycotting the Grammys, citing the music industry’s “false and destructive materialistic values.” Referring to news reports that a British d.j. had suggested that O’Connor needed a spanking, Hall jokingly offered his services. “What are you doing later?” she replied with a smirk.
When Hall took on the topic of race, he did so in a newly proud, confrontational register. In the early nineties, Black culture was adopting the anti-assimilation tenor of Spike Lee movies and of albums like Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet.” African Americans weren’t trying to move on up so much as force mainstream America to prove that it could be down. Robert Matthew Van Winkle, better known as Vanilla Ice, also appeared on Hall’s show in 1991. His début single, “Ice Ice Baby,” had become the first hip-hop song to hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Hall asked Van Winkle about rumors that his “street” persona was a ruse. “I am from the streets,” Van Winkle pushed back, “and if you can’t see that I’m from the streets then you’re blind, because the majority of white people, you know, cannot dance.” Van Winkle had brought Flavor Flav along, prompting Hall to ask, “Is that to show that you have a Black supporter?”
“The Arsenio Hall Show,” in its first week on the air, came in second in the ratings, after Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”—but Hall trounced Carson in the highly coveted under-thirty-five demographic. Two years later, “Saturday Night Live” aired a sketch in which a desperate late-night host named Carsenio (Dana Carvey) dons an oversized red suit and adopts Hall’s risqué, race-conscious style of humor in an attempt to appear hip. “Have you ever noticed how white guys hold themselves down there?” he says, reaching for his groin. “What are they holding down there, anyway?”
In “Arsenio” (Simon & Schuster), a forthcoming memoir written by Hall with Alan Eisenstock, a co-author of “Hang Time: My Life in Basketball,” by Elgin Baylor, and other celebrity memoirs, the late-night host describes that “S.N.L.” moment as surreal. Growing up in Ohio, Hall had dreamed of being Carson: “When most kids in Cleveland wanted to be football stars like Jim Brown, I wanted to be an old white man with a talk show.” Six decades later, the job of telling corny jokes to a studio audience of Midwestern tourists still belongs largely to white men—one of the many reasons that Hall’s book, though essentially a chronicle of early-nineties cultural politics and his place within it, feels well timed.
Late night these days has lost its after-hours edge, with publicist-friendly interview questions and political “satire” that reads like something off a teleprompter at the D.N.C. Today’s late-night hosts have faced censorship nonetheless. Jimmy Kimmel’s show was briefly placed on hiatus after he called out the right wing’s rush to judgment about the motives of Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” on CBS, was cancelled three days after Colbert criticized the network’s decision to settle a lawsuit with Donald Trump. But these examples are more symptoms of the Administration’s thin skin than signs of actual bite. (George Cheeks, the chair of TV media at Paramount, has said that the decision to cancel Colbert was a financial one.)
Late night’s self-muting hasn’t gone unnoticed. In March, Vanity Fair ran a story on “The New Late Night.” What struck me, besides the fact that none of the ten featured hosts occupies a late spot—they’re YouTubers and podcasters—was how many of them have made forbidden speech their brand. The comedian Ziwe Fumudoh got her start with the web series “Baited with Ziwe,” which brought on “cancelled” celebrities in a kind of public-shaming ritual; the comic Kareem Rahma, of “Subway Takes,” invites his guests to offer contentious opinions while riding public transit. (Rahma told my colleague Andrew Marantz that Kamala Harris’s team wouldn’t let her express her actual take—that people shouldn’t remove their shoes on planes—for fear of offending barefoot-leaning voters.) Oddly missing from the article was Adam Friedland, the edgelord comedian who recently hosted Gavin Newsom on his show. The California Governor had just told CNN that the Democrats should focus less on “pronouns” and be more “culturally normal.” Friedland advised Newsom that the next time the right complained about a Black Little Mermaid, his party should instead double down: “Say, ‘Pardon me. You’re a pussy, and that’s a baby movie.’ ” Newsom chuckled nervously. In an era in which politicians are focus-grouped to the point of parody, the exchange felt like samizdat smuggled across the borders of liberal piety.
Late night isn’t just a time slot. It’s a concept, a temporal metaphor for what we can get away with under the cloak of night, when the kids are asleep, when we can claim innocence—nothing else was on! Like the “late-night” dissidents of YouTube, Hall rose to popularity by talking up the verboten. In his day, when the term “inner city” circulated as a racist bogeyman, Hall brought the soundscape of “the hood” into people’s living rooms. When promiscuity had been branded a public-health crisis by the religious right, he asked Madonna about the stamina of her boyfriend and “Dick Tracy” co-star, Warren Beatty. “Joan Collins once called him sexually insatiable,” Hall offered. Madonna begged to differ: “I would say that he’s satiable.”
In 1988, the year before his show premièred, Hall starred in “Coming to America,” a romantic comedy about an African prince (Eddie Murphy) who travels to Queens, New York, along with his aide (Hall), to find a bride. They make a stop at the Jackson Heights Y.M.C.A., where a Miss Black Awareness pageant is taking place. A reverend, also played by Hall, launches into a spirited sermon about the bikini-clad contestants: “Man cannot make it like this! Larry Flynt! Hugh Hefner! They can take the picture, but you can’t make it! Only God above, the Hugh Hefner on high, can make it for ya!”
Hall later told Howard Stern that he’d based the character, in part, on his father, Fred Hall, whom he calls, in his memoir, a “strict, conservative Baptist preacher.” Not so conservative—at sixty-five, he married Annie Martin, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a church deacon. Hall was born to the odd couple in 1956 in Cleveland. (The “dog pound” is a reference to a raucous fan section in the city’s football stadium.) In his book, Hall describes their union as an opposites-attract situation. Fred listened to Mahalia Jackson spirituals, while Annie preferred Elvis and Ray Charles—what Fred called “hip-slapping music.” Nonetheless, Hall identifies a sensuality in his father’s sermonizing which would inspire his own late-night persona. “He doesn’t just preach,” Hall writes. “He puts on a show. With handkerchief in hand, he prowls the pulpit, he gesticulates, he growls, he shouts, he whispers.”
When Hall was five, his mother moved out, taking him with her. She worked long hours and got him a babysitter—an Emerson TV set, on which he would watch Carson, Merv Griffin, and Dinah Shore. “I get hooked on Dinah!, not what you would expect from a Black kid living in the ghetto,” he observes. Then again, representation was scarce—Jet magazine ran a column called “Television” that listed every Black person who was going to appear that week. But to the young Hall the color line wasn’t the biggest hurdle—bedtime was. He was in grade school, and Carson came on at 11:30 P.M. He writes, “I turn the sound way down, then crawl so close to the TV screen that I feel as if I’m practically inside The Tonight Show set, sitting next to Johnny.” He hosted the first “Arsenio Hall Show” in his basement. His musical guest, “Junior Brown from down the street,” sang the Temptations’ “Get Ready” on a Mattel Show’N Tell.
Fred Hall had hoped that his son would join the clergy, but Hall dreamed of becoming a magician, just like his idol, Johnny Carson. Hall’s book is in some ways a magician’s memoir of making it, capturing a working-class kid who pulls opportunities out of a hat. A teen-age cousin of Hall’s, who came to live with him and his mother after becoming pregnant, brought a book called “Magic for Beginners” home from the library. Hall taught himself tricks, sprinkling jokes into his performance: “I know all the white magicians say abracadabra. I say collard greens.”
Hall is frequently described as the first Black late-night talk-show host, but his memoir corrects the record. That honor belongs to Ellis Haizlip, the host of “Soul!,” which aired on PBS from 1968 to 1973, with guests including Toni Morrison, Al Greene, Muhammad Ali, Stokely Carmichael—and a fifteen-year-old magician named Arsenio Hall. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, the celebrated griot active in the Black Arts Movement, had seen Hall performing magic at Karamu House, a historic African American theatre in Cleveland, and passed along his card to a producer at “Soul!” Soon, Hall was on a plane to New York to make his first TV appearance. (Hall would later invite young talent on his show, including a six-year-old Elvis impersonator from Hawaii named Bruno Mars.)
Hall pivoted to comedy when he realized that he was getting bigger cheers for his one-liners than for his card tricks. He began listening to the records of the standup comedian Redd Foxx. Foxx had come out of the Chitlin’ Circuit, a national vaudeville-esque network of venues for Black performers which emerged during Jim Crow. Foxx and his mentor, Moms Mabley, blended folklore, political commentary, and a subversive style of blue humor. Moms Mabley used the erotic to challenge the image of the desexed mammy; Foxx, conversely, played into the stereotype of the oversexed Black male, influencing later comedians such as Richard Pryor and Chris Rock. In 1993, when Hall received the Richard Pryor Award at the Soul Train Comedy Awards, he brought Pryor, then on a mobility scooter, onstage. The pair received a standing ovation, and a woman in the balcony shouted, “I love you, Richard!” Pryor shouted back, “Well, suck my dick then!”
The history of late night is a kind of dialectic between the traditional and the transgressive, the adult in the room and the kid who refuses to be tucked in. For a time, those parts were played by Ed Sullivan, the host of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and the upstart Steve Allen, a former radio host who, in 1954, created and hosted the “Tonight Show.” In “Inventing Late Night,” a 2005 history of the original “Tonight Show,” the writer Ben Alba muses, “It all seems so simple: the home base desk, the opening monologue, the announcer/sidekick, the horsing around with the bandleader, the breezy celebrity chats, the wacky stunts, the comedy sketches. . . . Five nights a week.” But, he notes, “this formula did not exist before Steve Allen.”
As a radio jockey, Allen had his staff pick up “kooks” off the street whom he’d interview on the air. He brought the same audaciousness to late night. But his approach wasn’t just structurally unconventional. When Sullivan refused to have Ingrid Bergman on because she’d had an affair with the married director Roberto Rossellini, Allen booked her on his new Sunday-night show. He invited on the boundary-pushing political comedian Lenny Bruce and devoted an entire episode to McCarthyism.
Allen eventually ceded his seat to Jack Paar. Then, in 1962, Johnny Carson—acerbic but amiable—took over, transforming the “Tonight Show” into a national landmark. When Carson retired, in 1992, Bob Hope compared it to “a head falling off Mt. Rushmore.” But, after living through the cultural turbulence and the political disappointments of the seventies, baby boomers were eager to topple institutions. Enter David Letterman, a late-night host who often broke the fourth wall to mock the very act of television-making. In an episode from 1986, he joked, “Most Friday afternoons, we tape a piece for our program on the streets of New York City. Now, this, of course, takes planning, meticulous preparation, and a lot of hard work, so it was only a matter of time before we said to hell with it.” He then followed a pair of tourists from Louisville around for the afternoon, nudging them to Trump Tower and, eventually, to the inside of Trump’s office. “We’ll do a couple real-estate deals in Louisville,” the future President offered.
By the early eighties, Hall, who had moved to Los Angeles after graduating from Kent State, was a regular on the standup-comedy circuit, performing at such venues as the Comedy Store and Hollywood Improv and befriending comics including Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy. Hall never got his chance to appear on the “Tonight Show” with his idol behind the desk—Carson’s booker told him he wasn’t a “Johnny guy”—but, in 1983, Letterman had him on. Hall introduced himself: “My name is Arsenio. It’s a very unique name for a Black man. In Greek, it means Leroy.”
Hall once described himself as “the talk-show host for the MTV generation,” and his show did possess, from the start, the kinetic glamour of a music video. In 1988, after Hall had a successful stint guest-hosting Joan Rivers’s short-lived “Late Show,” Paramount offered him his own hour. He made music a centerpiece of the new endeavor, even penning his own theme song, “It’s Hall or Nothing.” His first week, he booked the R. & B. bad boy Bobby Brown for two songs, including a five-minute version of “My Prerogative.” Lucie Salhany, the president of TV at Paramount, objected: “Carson does one song and never more than three minutes.” But when the ratings for the show’s first week, propelled by Brown’s pelvic thrusts, came in, Salhany “practically screams,” Hall writes. Time magazine put Hall on the cover later that year, proclaiming, “We are seeing the future of the TV talk show, and it is, well, funky.”
Forty per cent of the local affiliates that picked up “The Arsenio Hall Show” belonged to a network that had launched a little more than two years earlier—Fox. The new channel soon became home to the largest number of Black-produced shows on a single network in the history of television, including the sketch-comedy show “In Living Color,” sometimes called the Black “S.N.L.,” and the sitcoms “Living Single” and “Martin.” A Nielsen survey from November, 1990, revealed that Black households watched forty-eight per cent more TV than other audiences did. (White audiences, with more disposable income, had begun diverting their eyeballs to cable.) In “Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television,” the scholar Kristal Brent Zook writes that Fox engaged in “ ‘narrowcasting’ or targeting a specific black viewership.” (Zook notes that Pam Veasey, the head writer on “In Living Color,” “cynically referred to it as the ‘Nike and Doritos audience.’ ”)
In the ambitious new book “Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy from Vaudeville to ’90s Sitcoms” (HarperCollins), the journalist Geoff Bennett argues that the nineties Nielsen surveys “transformed the career trajectory” of Black comedians. NBC premièred shows like “A Different World,” a “Cosby Show” spinoff set at a fictional H.B.C.U. called Hillman College. Hall spurred this revolution in TV programming by booking its stars, among them Martin Lawrence, of “Martin,” and Lisa Bonet, whose “Cosby Show” character, Denise, attends Hillman. His greenroom became a hangout spot, and an accidental boardroom, for Black Hollywood. “People make connections, pitch shows, propose deals,” Hall writes. “Will Smith and Quincy Jones discuss doing a sitcom about a Black teenager from a poor neighborhood who moves in with a wealthy Beverly Hills family.”
But, as a late-night show designed for a general, cross-racial audience, “The Arsenio Hall Show” also allowed viewers to see how white celebrities, and by extension white people, interacted with Black culture and its makers. The Time profile described “The Arsenio Hall Show” as a “melting pot,” a term that’s as much of a throwback as MC Hammer’s parachute pants. (The rapper first performed “U Can’t Touch This” on Hall’s show.) At a time when mainstream media was warning its audience about “the inner city,” Hall’s show proved that “the street” and its culture—from Reebok high-tops to gangster rap—were objects of white fascination and longing. Hall even made comedic fodder out of the desire for proximity to Black culture. An episode with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen opens with Hall teaching the pint-size twins to shoot dice.
Revisiting the culture wars of the late eighties and early nineties, I gathered that the only thing scarier to Middle America than the word “urban” was sex that occurred outside the confines of heterosexual marriage. The AIDS crisis had inspired a wave of conservative backlash against the gains of the women’s and queer-liberation movements. The disease was painted as punishment for a sexually liberated life style. In response, a slew of artists embraced a kind of baroque eroticism. At the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards, which Hall hosted, Prince performed a seven-minute version of “Gett Off” surrounded by dancers simulating an orgy. A year later, Madonna released “Sex,” a coffee-table book that depicted the Material Girl in ménage-à-trois and B.D.S.M. encounters. When Magic Johnson decided to do a sit-down interview about his H.I.V. diagnosis, he chose Hall’s show. Hall suggested that he go on a more serious program, like “Nightline” or “Larry King,” but Johnson replied, “I have to go where I’m comfortable.”
It was in this context that Hall became late night’s most flirtatious host. In 2026, watching a male host encourage a female guest to perch on his lap—as Hall jokingly did with Whitney Houston—might not, shall we say, sit well. (Houston, for her part, plunked down and wrapped her arms around him.) But, back then, Hall’s touchy-feeliness could have had another valence. As he eyed up his ex-girlfriend Emma Samms, an actress on “Dynasty,” when she came on his show, he was flaunting interracial, premarital escapades. One forgets that interracial dating was still considered illicit in the nineties—Spike Lee made the contentious topic the subject of his 1991 film, “Jungle Fever.”
But some thought that Hall wasn’t doing enough boundary-breaking for those most affected by the AIDS crisis. In 1991, activists from Queer Nation interrupted a taping to protest the show’s lack of L.G.B.T.Q. guests. Hall got heated and defensive. “You think I haven’t had somebody on the show because they’re gay?” he yelled. “I’m Black, man. I’m the biggest minority you know about.” In his memoir, he blames the limitations of the era: “What do you expect me to say? Put your hands together for that well-known balladeer and homosexual, Luther Vandross?”
On April 29, 1992, Los Angeles was ablaze. Four policemen who had been captured on video brutally beating an African American man named Rodney King were acquitted of ten of eleven state charges, leading to riots across the city. On the second night of unrest, Hall devoted a show to the verdict. Paramount had safety concerns, but Hall pleaded his case, saying, “Sean Penn already said he’ll come.” (Penn joined Mayor Tom Bradley and the actor Edward James Olmos.) Not long afterward, some music equipment went missing. Hall reported it, and that night a security guard stopped Hall and his assistant as they were driving off the Paramount lot, asking to check the trunk. Hall lost it: “Did you search Ted Danson’s car when he left?” (“Cheers” was shot on the same lot.) Hall’s assistant got out and broke the wooden gate, and the pair drove off. “I’m not proud that we broke the Paramount gate,” Hall writes. “I’m less proud of the anger I feel constantly, coiled inside me like a live electrical wire.”
The atmosphere in Hollywood was shifting. (By 1994, Fox had cancelled its Black sitcoms following Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of N.F.L. distribution rights.) In Hall’s third year, Salhany had called him into her office—his ratings were dipping. “The show is very . . . Black,” she said, noting that he had referred to a guest as “brother” that week. “Mark Wahlberg,” Hall replied, puzzled. Then, in 1993, CBS announced that the “Late Show with David Letterman” would air in Hall’s usual time slot. Hall knew that Letterman would siphon off younger viewers and told his manager that he was writing a letter of resignation. In February of 1994, Hall interviewed Louis Farrakhan, the notoriously antisemitic and misogynist leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan, who was planning the Million Man March, was set to appear on the cover of Time and was slated to be on “20/20” with Barbara Walters that spring. In April, Hall resigned, but when Paramount announced his departure many had the impression that he had been fired for booking Farrakhan. Hall is adamant in the memoir that he told executives in advance of his plans to leave, therein refuting the idea that he had been the victim of Jewish censorship.
Since the final broadcast of Hall’s show, in 1994, his presence in popular culture has been sporadic. He was the first Black winner of “Celebrity Apprentice,” in 2012, beating out Clay Aiken and raising two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Magic Johnson Foundation. In 2013, Hall staged a comeback, relaunching his show on CBS; it was cancelled after one season, owing to poor ratings. Hall recognized that the landscape had changed. He told TV Guide that he didn’t foresee any interviews like the one he’d had with Brooke Shields in 1989, in which he asked her how losing her virginity was going: “We’re in this world now where publicists control this so much, I don’t know if I can have conversations like that.”
There’s an odd dearth of autobiographies by late-night hosts. Carson never wrote one, and neither has Letterman. Fallon and Kimmel have published children’s books. The “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah’s “Born a Crime” focusses on his experiences growing up mixed race in apartheid South Africa. The only real corollary to “Arsenio” is Jay Leno’s “Leading with My Chin,” from 1996. Perhaps Hall, in writing his memoir, sensed that the culture needed a reminder of what “it’s a night thing”—one of his slogans—means.
In the book, Hall writes about a time he took Prince to an “after-hours joint.” “It’s where people go to dance after they finish working. Strippers, pimps, you know, night folks,” Hall explained to the singer. At a makeshift speakeasy in a Los Angeles living room, the legendary musician sat on a barstool, watching intently. He told Hall, “I’m looking at what these girls dance to at three in the morning. What moves them. What makes them put down their drink and dance.” Great late night asks the same questions. Its jokes are for people who stay up late to steal back time for themselves. Being in bed doesn’t mean you’re ready for sleep, and night folks won’t abide hosts who turn their own volume down. ♦