14/04/2026
From the Cracked Archive:
If you’ve ever shoved your fist inside a sock and pretended it was your best friend, you probably owe a debt to Shari Lewis, the entertainer who created sassy stocking Lambchop. Lewis invented the six-year-old sheep for the Captain Kangaroo show all the way back in 1956. Adults were charmed by Lambchop and other Lewis creations like Charlie Horse, Hush Puppy and Wing Ding — the ventriloquist and her felt friends were staples on programs like The Ed Sullivan Show. Lewis’s own children’s show earned her a Peabody Award.
Conspicuously absent from accounts of Lewis’s menagerie was a puppet by the name of Billy Goatee. The character made Tonight Show history by being the only voice during Johnny Carson’s New York tenure to get bleeped by the network, according to Mark Malkoff’s Love Johnny Carson: One Obsessive Fan's Journey to Find the Genius Behind the Legend.
The 1966 interview began innocently enough, with Lewis answering Johnny’s questions directly. Soon, shy Lambchop joined the conversation. According to Love Johnny Carson, the “exchange was sweet and heartfelt.”
But then Lewis played a wild card, a stunt I can’t find evidence of ever happening again on television. She brought out a second puppet — not Charlie Horse or Hush Puppy, but a new character named Billy Goatee. “He’s obscene,” Lewis told Carson. “He can’t help it. He’s a dirty old man.”
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