Hosts with the most

Hosting the Academy Awards, as Jon Stewart is about to find out, is at once exhilarating, terrifying, rewarding and headache-inducing.

It's one of the most high-profile jobs a comic can land. But it's also a thankless gig in front of a distracted, nervous audience, and the truth is the host has very little control over a very long evening.

Stewart will become the 27th person to handle the duties solo. If he's really good and more than a little lucky, he may just pull off a performance — or at least a moment or two — that measures up to the classics on this list.



1. In the soup

In the days leading up to the 64th Oscar show in 1992, Billy Crystal was so sick that he couldn't come to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to rehearse.

Contingency plans were useless — after all, this isn't a role that has an understudy — but bed rest and infusions of his wife's chicken soup apparently worked wonders, because Crystal recovered enough to have his finest night as Oscar host.

He came onstage strapped to a cart, à la Hannibal Lecter from "The Silence of the Lambs," and delivered one of the best of his song medleys. Then he took Jack Palance's feverish acceptance speech, complete with its one-armed push-ups, and turned it into a memorable running gag. According to Crystal, Palance ... "is backstage on the StairMaster" ... "just bungee-jumped off the Hollywood sign" ... "has just won the New York primary" ... and finally, "will be hosting the [Oscars] next year."

To top it off, Crystal brought the house down with a genuine ad-lib when 100-year-old Hal Roach, who was supposed to stand and bow but not speak, suddenly launched into an unmiked, inaudible speech. "I think that's fitting," he said, "because Mr. Roach started in silent films."

2. Splet decisions

Alan Splet was simply a sound editor who couldn't make it to the Oscars, but Johnny Carson turned the man into a household name in 1980. "It always happens," said Carson when the winner was absent. "First George C. Scott doesn't show, then Marlon Brando, and now Alan Splet."

Understand, jokes like this did not necessarily go over well inside the academy, whose non-acting branches can be sensitive about punch lines predicated on the anonymity of their members.

Still, Carson kept it up. Throughout the show, he gave Splet updates — first saying the honoree had missed his offramp and was "somewhere in Ensenada," and later adding, "He's had trouble with his carburetor outside of Barstow."

3. Martin the mediator

As Michael Moore raged, "We live in fictitious times!" from the stage of the Kodak Theatre in 2003, the audience grew restless. Scattered boos, a rarity on any Oscar telecast, were audible in the auditorium, while backstage, a few of the normally quiet union stagehands got vocal: a shouted obscenity here, a cry of "Get him off!" there.