40 Of The Most Memorable Moments On The Dick Cavett Show

Do you remember Dick Cavett? To this day he’s considered one of the greatest talk show hosts to have ever existed. He interviewed a vast variety of guests throughout the ’70s, and somehow managed to get them talking like they never had before. Here’s 40 of the most memorable moments of his show. If you saw any of these live, you saw little bits of history without even knowing it.

40. Salvador Dalí brings his anteater

If you had Salvador Dalí on your show, things were inevitably going to be weird, since he might just take the crown for strangest artist of his era. When he appeared on Cavett’s show in 1971, he brought along a pet anteater, which he ended up throwing so that it landed in silent film actress Lillian Gish’s lap. The anteater’s thoughts on this are sadly unrecorded.

39. Cavett interviews John and Yoko

Back in September 1971 Cavett interviewed John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and a part of music history was made when they debuted their new song “Imagine.” So famous was this particular interview that it made an appearance in the movie Forrest Gump, with Tom Hanks’ Gump edited in over Yoko Ono.

38. Roy Dotrice takes off his makeup

Roy Dotrice made his career by pretending to be an old man, namely the character of John Aubrey in the play Brief Lives. After that, he personified other characters who were many years older than him. Come 1974 he went on The Dick Cavett Show in full “ancient guy” makeup and gave audiences a crash course in prosthetics as he took it off piece by piece.

37. Cavett slams English food

Dick Cavett apparently didn’t like English cuisine, not in the slightest. While interviewing chef Julia Child in 1980 he mused, “Maybe people in any country are indifferent to food. Certainly 90 percent of the English must be from the evidence.” Then he added, “There are some marvelous restaurants in England, but in general the glop that they ingest is truly phenomenal.” Ouch.