What to say about Johnny Carson? For one, he was firmly part of my parents' world, and whenever I caught a glimpse of him in my younger years, it always seemed to be a treat that I was actualy up that late. And to think that for most of his tenure, his show clocked in at an incredible 90 minutes. Can you imagine Leno regularly punching the clock like that?
Even better, can you imagine anyone wanting to watch for that long anymore?
Here's OGIC, who seems to capture exactly what I'm feeling right now:
For what it's worth, I'm a little too young to know what I think about Carson. My parents watched him, but by the time I was staying up that late there was Letterman, whose first NBC show I'd watch after my parents had gone to bed. So I have a certain nostalgia-once-removed for Carson's Tonight Show. It was the show I mildly looked forward to being old enough to watch, but whose appeal had dwindled and been displaced by the time I was.
Sometime in the early 1970s, my father sort of heckled Carson at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island. Somehow, my father was the only person in the audience that night who knew about a Midwest regional airline called Gopher -- and he was more than happy to volunteer the information when Johnny asked if anyone knew about them while he was setting up a joke.
As many of you might already know, I'm a graduate of Catholic University, an institution whose most prominent alumni has to be Johnny's sidekick Ed McMahon (I met McMahon twice, but those are stories for another time). In the radio station office at CUA hung three photos: Pope John Paul II, and then just below to the left and the right, autographed pictures of both Johnny and Ed.
If anything, Carson was the last person to occupy the Tonight Show chair when it still mattered in the national mind. He left at just the right moment: With more than enough time left to enjoy a well deserved retirement and long before the show descended into cultural irrelevance (where it now sits with its network cousin Saturday Night Live).
He had a great run. He was funny in an inoffensive way, and made people feel comfortable.
And that's as good an epitaph as any.
OooooooOOOoooo burn to Leno… expect angry letters from his followers.
SNL, irrelevant? In your dreams! Will Forte’s impression of Zell Miller is one of the funniest things on TV since … well, Will Ferrell’s impression of Bush. And thanks to tsunami relief, they managed to bring back Darrell Hammond’s classic Clinton persona.
Back to Carson — the amazing skill he had was in making people like him so much without being ingratiating like Leno. Understated charm is an underrated skill.