Whoooooooo’s Johnny?

For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off. —Johnny Carson

He started his job when Jack Kennedy was president and left it the year Bill Clinton was elected. For Americans in the second half of the 20th century he seemed to have been always around, and always would be. So I was sorry, and surprised, to hear on Sunday that Johnny Carson, king of The Tonight Show for nearly 30 years and more than 4,000 episodes, had died, at a reclusive, relatively youthful 79.

But the chorus of keening on TV news and variety shows threatens to extend the state mourning for this talk-show host to a Reaganesque six days. On CNN (your official site for the Carson reliquary), on PBS (The Jim Lehrer News Hour) and of course on NBC (where Carson’s successor, Jay Leno, emceed a comely hour last night), the Grey Panther parade of Carson’s octogenarian guests came, to pay a last homage to the man who had made their careers — and, only incidentally, to score rare face time on the medium that nurtured them. “His death,” David Steinberg said of Carson on Aaron Brown’s CNN show last night, “has been a boon to comedians who haven’t been on TV for quite a while.” On the same show, Esquire’s Bill Zehme noted the procession of effusive tributes to this very private star, and added, “If Johnny were alive today, he would die.”

A Life in Pictures
A photoessay on the life of Johnny Carson

TIME Archive
Johnny Carson in the pages of TIME over the years

TIME Collection
The best mentions of Johnny Carson in TIME’s Archive

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Carson made TIME’s cover in 1967

What prolonged the media attention, other than the reach of the star’s eminence and the need to fill air time in a slow news week, was the enigma of Carson. Millions saw and liked him 150 times a year, yet he steadfastly hoarded the essence of his personality. “If the conversation edges toward areas in which he feels ill at ease or unwilling to commit himself,” wrote Kenneth Tynan, who interviewed Carson for a 1977 New Yorker profile reprinted in the book Show People, “burglar alarms are triggered off, defensive reflexes rise around him like an invisible stockade, and you hear the distant baying of guard dogs.”

Anyone who watched Carson, studied him, as we all did, for decades, saw two things: the Univac brain, riffling through the comic possibilities as he listened to his guest, and an instant later ejected the perfect bon mot; and his distance from the action, as if he were watching the show and himself from some Olympian aerie, where it was always cool. Tynan writes of Carson appraising the other guests at a party, “his eyes twinkling like icicles.” It was what we know, from Carson’s avatar Letterman, as Midwestern cool: ingratiating but withholding.

Johnny knew his limitations — some called it shyness, others arrogance — and, naturally, bent it into a joke. “I will not even talk to myself without an appointment,” he wrote in the late 60s. In lieu of interviews, Carson supplied all-purpose answers to journalists’ probes: “Yes, I did”; “I can’t answer that question”; and “As often as possible, but I’m not very good at it yet. I need much more practice.”

Ten happy memories of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson:

1. Ed Ames throwing a tomahawk that landed near the groin (actually, in the inner right thigh) of a silhouetted figure on a board. Carson: “Welcome to ‘Frontier Briss.'”

2. The early appearances of these young stand-ups: Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Godfrey Cambridge, Joan Rivers. Each one smote a Philadelphia kid with the force of comic revelation. And each one, and a hundred others, vaulted from the Tonight Show spotlight into life-long careers, sitcoms, movies, a fame nearly as enduring as that of the host who cackled, winkedand gave the OK sign from his desk.

3. Paul Ehrlich, a biologist from Cal Berkeley, who in the early 70s became a superstar on Carson’ show by predicting that the earth’s population would be 12 billion by the year 2000. (Population in 2000: 6.5 billion.)

4. Autumn in New York and Moonlight in Vermont: Not only did the two tunes seem to run constantly through his head, but, he would say every few months, “They’re the same song!” One night, a psychic asked him to think of any phrase, any phrase. I know what it would be, and it was: Moonlight in Vermont.

5. Art Fern: “Go to the Slaussen Cut-off, cut off your slaussen, get back in your car…” Art was one of the half-dozen characters Carson played over the years, and underlined the connection of this up-to-date show to the antique traditions of vaudeville, where the star would wear outlandish garb, leer at his voluptuous stooge, pirouette pratfalls — as Carson did once, with precision timing, onto his own (breakaway) desk.

6. Joe Namath, on the couch (but in a nice way) with a feminist author. Why should boy children be more desirable than girl children, she asked. Namath, plaintively: “But I want a little Joe.”

7. Jim Fowler’s (or Joan Embery’s) wild animals, most of whom seemed unnaturally attracted to the host’s hair.

8. The wedding of Tiny Tim and Miss Vicky: Carson’s all-time highest-rated show featured the nuptials of an eccentric ukeleleist (whom I had seen perform in his early Village days) and a 17-year-old fan. The following week, Carson had a honeymoon joke: “There are already signs of trouble in the marriage. Last night Miss Vicky hung a sign on their hotel room doorknob that said: ‘Disturb.'”

9. Desk gag: “McDonald’s this week sold its one billionth hamburger. Why, do you realize that if all the meat in those burgers were stacked up, it would stretch to here?” — and he raises his hand a foot from the desk top. (McDonald’s threatened to sue, not realizing it was goofy to demand a retraction for a joke.)

10. Monologue gag: “Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman were divorced, on grounds of irreconcilable faces.”

He was good with 10 million people, lousy with 10. —Ed McMahon, to Jay Leno on Monday’s edition of The Tonight Show

Born in Corning, Iowa, and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, Carson found his calling when he read a magic book. He dubbed himself the Great Carsoni and quickly learned — or found within himself, the secrets of conjuring —misdirection, poise, timing, a commanding personality —which are also the secrets of standup comedy. His model was Jack Benny, the radio comedian. Benny could pull a laugh out of a sour audience with only a pause and a stare, which was pretty daring for an aural medium. Dick Cavett, who would later write for Carson and host his own talk show on ABC and PBS —and who at 13 saw Carson, then 23 and back from Navy service in World War II, perform in a Lincoln church basement —says that Johnny’s thesis at the University of Nebraska was on Benny and the mastery of comic pacing. Was it called It’s All in the Timing? That was the motto embroidered on a cushion that Tynan found in Carson’s home office.

Disc jockey; writer and occasional performer on Red Skelton’s CBS show, which for one night gave him the whiff of stardom when he substituted for the injured star; host of a short-lived interview show, Carson’s Cellar, and a flop CBS skein, The Johnny Carson Show; then, in 1957, the gig that earned him fame, an ABC daily quiz program, Who Do You Trust? The Q&A portion of the show was negligible; it was Carson’s fast, easy banter with his guests that got the attention of the NBC brass. Jack Paar, whose eventful reign as host of The Tonight Show had also begun in 1957, was itching to do a prime-time chat fest. The network courted Groucho Marx, Bob Newhart and others, but settled on Carson, who took over in the fall of 1962.

Paar had been hot, mercurial, no surer of what he would do next than his audience. If he’d tangled with NBC earlier that day, or if his daughter Randy got her first training bra, he blurted it out on the air. The show’s intimate, neurotic tone made watching Paar an energizing, enervating experience —Event Television.. Carson established order, control (one of his favorite words), an elastic predictability. After the Paar boil, Carson, with his sang froid and what Tynan calls “his cobra-swift one-liners,” brought a cooler temperature to Tonight. He seemed to verify Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that TV is a cool medium, not for shouters but for soothers. (This was before Crossfire.) He was also a dry white wine in the sweet, gushy Manischewitz Concord Grape world of showbiz. Other comics might beg for love; Carson accepted the laughs, but, I’ll bet, didn’t need them to warm his needy heart. What need? Some would say, what heart? Remember that sang froid means cold blood.

Under Carson, The Tonight Show became Habit Television, which is how the sponsors like it, and most viewers too. Not everyone wanted the Paar caffeine jolt after midnight; what’s needed is a pleasing comedy sedative. The ratings underlined the acuity of Carson’s choice. After 15 years his audience had nearly tripled Paar’s, and accounted for 17% of NBC’s revenue.

Soon America got to know Johnny —what did I say!? We to know his mannerisms: the wink, which could be mischievous or genially conspiratorial; the spasmodically shrugging shoulders, a la Bogart (one of Carson’s favorite and most frequent guests, Don Rickles, said the other night, “I thought he was a football player and the pads were too high”); and the sharp, brittle laugh, which was less an expression of mirth than a cue to the audience that his current guest had passed the test. This ha-ha bark was humanized by proximity to the warmer, manly, practiced guffaw of his announcer, Ed McMahon. But that was Ed’s job: the designated laugher, his boss’ exemplary yes man. (Literally, since he would add a Yes! to the laugh.)

Carson was easy to imitate (by Rich Little in the 60s, Dana Carvey in the 90s, with Phil Hartman superb as Ed), difficult to know. As McMahon once said, in a remark I find both delphic and profound, John packs a tight suitcase. Even those closest to him had trouble figuring out if they had pleased him, and some of them suffered when, without realizing it, they fell short. He fired his brother Dick from directing the show (Dick then directed Merv Griffin’s daytime schmoozathon). He summarily canned Art Stark, who had produced Who Do You Trust? and, for its first five years, the Carson Tonight Show. He broke up rancorously with his agent-lawyer-manager Henry (Bombastic) Bushkin. He also divorced his first three wives. In an uncharacteristically revealing moment in the 60s, Carson said that a man has to choose, and realize, which is more important, his family or his job. For him, he said, it was the job.

He did fine at the job, earning himself millions each year, the network tens of millions. His negotiations with NBC won him a severely reduces work load, from 90 mins,. five times a week, 48 weeks a year, to an hour three times a week, 37 weeks a year, with reruns and substitutes filling the other slots. (By the end he was his own gust host.) But he didn’t use the spare time for Manhattan or Beverly Hills partying. Working the room made him acutely uncomfortable. He was a loner who shrank from revealing his feelings, if he had them. Joanna Carson, Johnny’s third wife, told Tynan she had seen her husband cry only once: at Jack Benny’s funeral.

“The most annoying thing about Carson is his unwillingness to swing, to trust himself or his guests. … He never looks at you; he’s too busy (1) watching the audience to see if they are responding, and (2) searching the face of his producer for reassurance.” —Rex Reed

He wasn’t trying to swing; he was trying to steer. Steer guests into the studio audience’s acceptance; steer the home viewer into responding as enthusiastically as the studio audience did; and steer the mass of viewers to advertisers. Helmsman may not be the word. Say, instead, salesman. The more people who watched — rather, who tuned in and didn’t tune out because something affronted them or sailed over their heads — the more money the show, the network and Carson made.

He explained this to a 1977 group of Harvard undergraduates, one of whom had tiptoed toward the dumbing-down issue. “If you’re selling hard goods — like soup or dog food — you simply can’t afford to put on culture,” he said. “Exxon, the Bank of America — organizations like that can afford to do it [by sponsoring ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ and other PBS shows of higher brow]. But they aren’t selling hard goods, and that’s what ‘The Tonight Show’ has to do.”

As a cultural weathervane, Carson straddled two eras: the 50s and 60s, when all arbiters of popular taste, from a magazine editor to a comedian-host, were expected to pretend some interest in high culture; and the last 30 years, when those same custodians of taste were allowed, commanded, to express no interest. Readers of a certain age can recall when every New York Times music critic was writing about classical music, except for the guy on the jazz beat, and when opera divas graced the cover of TIME. (No rock performers were cover boys until the Beatles in 1967.) Now neither TIME nor Newsweek has a classical music critic, because neither magazine believes it has a need for one. They’re just flying with the Zeitgeist.

So, over the decades, did Carson. In his very first Tonight monologue, on Oct. 1, 1962, he told the audience, “I’m curious,” and he allowed his social and cultural curiosity fairly free rein. The young host would acknowledge that he attended the opera (his favorite: Giordano’s Andrea Chenier). He booked serious authors to fill the last 15 mins. of his then-90-min. broadcast. His musical guests eschewed rock ‘n roll; they included crooners, opera tenors and sopranos, lots of jazz men, both in the spotlight (Joe Williams must have sung Every Day I Have the Blues 40 times in those days) and on the bandstand, which was stocked with some of the best mainstream jazz musicians. Like Hugh Hefner, another essential taste-shaper of the period, Carson found that mixing esteemed authors and cool jazz with his staple entertainment (jokes for Johnny, Playmates for Hef) gave the enterprise a broader, higher reach.

The change in the booking patterns of The Tonight Show was inevitable. The reduction of the Tonight slot from 90 mins. to 60 meant something had to go: authors and opera. Pop and rock ruled the charts (though Carson was never comfortable with hard rockers). As for the 1972 move to L.A. — well, no, Southern California isn’t a cultural wasteland, and there were airplanes even then to bring the culturati out west. But it’s a company town, whose main products are movies and TV shows. The choice between, say, Joan Collins and Joan Sutherland was no choice at all.

Carson was willing to cede the class audience to PBS, as long as the mass stayed with him. And they did. It was a Q.E.D. of his own maxim: “People will pay more to be entertained than educated.”

“We work from the morning papers, and sometimes the audience isn’t yet aware of what’s happened in the news.” —Carson to Kenneth Tynan, 1977

It’s a truism worth repeating: Carson’s nightly monologue helped set the nation’s political and social agenda. The credit given to CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, in turning America against the Vietnam War with the raising of an editorial eyebrow now and then on his nightly news show, is more appropriately Johnny’s. When he made jokes about solemn topics like Vietnam, Watergate, errant Senators or TV evangelists, he enabled the audience to laugh the problem away. Presidents too. In one of his Carnac routines, where he played a swami who can divine the questions to answers he read from cards kept in a hermetically sealed jar since noon today on Funk & Wagnall’s porch, the answer was: “A tongue, teeth and a foot.” And the question: “What’s inside Ronald Reagan’s mouth?”

A Life in Pictures
A photoessay on the life of Johnny Carson

TIME Archive
Johnny Carson in the pages of TIME over the years

TIME Collection
The best mentions of Johnny Carson in TIME’s Archive

TIME Cover
Carson made TIME’s cover in 1967

If Carson can be said to have crucially tweaked popular opinion on one subject, it would be New York City, his base of operations since 1957. (“New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, mostly unsolved.”) A near-nightly barrage of jokes about the city’s crime rate, corruption and all-round filth began in 1964, with the Kitty Genovese story: a woman, attacked and murdered in Kew Garden, Queens, got no help from the dozens who supposedly witnessed the assault. It mattered not that many particulars of the story were false, or that in 1964 New York, also a prime target for Republican barbs about urban atrocities, enjoyed a lower murder rate than, say, Phoenix, the home town of G.O.P. Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

The anti-New York gibes escalated throughout the decade and beyond. Finally, in 1972, Carson moved himself and his show to Los Angeles. The reason, from today’s vantage point, is simple: he had found his perfect roost, his natural circle — a star among stars. Back then, though, to New Yorkers, it seemed less that he had left us than that he had abandoned us. Johnny to City: Drop Dead.

You could cite the Carson monologue, when it took a stand, any stand, as evidence of a cleansing chutzpah, for he called powerful politicians and the nation’s largest city to task with a wit much more corrosive than Will Rogers’ a half-century before. Or you could say that Carson’s monologues, making equal and indiscriminate merriment of movie stars and statesmen, Super Train and Three Mile Island, Cat Stevens and Kitty Genovese, reduced all current events to showbiz — that when everything was refracted through the prism of set-up and punch line, nothing was worth taking seriously.

This tendency devolved, six years after Carson’s departure, into the late-night boys’ reaction to Monicagate — a dirty joke that led to an impeachment. (Letterman developed a naked obsession with Clinton jokes; he was demanding new ones from his writers years after Clinton left the White House.) The host-comics were finally shocked out of their terminal facetiousness by the terror attacks on the World Trade Center. For a couple of years after that, they played by President Bush’s rules, and kept the looming war in Iraq off-limits for prickly criticism. (Excepting, always exception, Jon Stewart and the fearless, salubrious “Daily Show.”) They should have asked themselves: why we can’t satirize Bush as we did Clinton?

Carson proclaimed that he was a nonpartisan mocker. But to replay his monologues in the mind is to hear what would today be called a liberal voice. “In the monologue, Johnny will attack malfeasance, illiberal behavior, constitutional abuse,” Carson producer Fred de Cordova told Tynan: “But then compassion sets in. He was the first person to stop doing anti-Nixon jokes.” And of the characters Carson occasionally assumed, the one clearly meant to be ridiculed was Floyd Turbo, the right-wing gun nut. Carson embodied, with his usual diffidence, the starched, unemphatic, indeed implicit liberalism common to hosts of the day.

The trouble was that, over the years, Carson’s monologues retained their level of topical sophistication, while his studio audiences grew duller, less attuned to the issues he ridiculed. Not that Johnny was ever Mort Sahl or Will Durst, but his remarks demanded a certain savvy of his listeners regarding the news of the day — savvy the visitors to Burbank didn’t always possess. (He should have had Stewart’s well-read audience.) To make a topical joke, he was thus obliged to lace the set-up with a brief civics lesson, explaining who the malefactors were and how they’d screwed up; only then could he get to the punch line. Some critics charged Carson with contributing to the dumbing of America; in fact, he wasn’t the perp but the victim. At times, he was too hip for his own room.

By the end, during the last year when Carson had long since announced his impending retirement, the star got his biggest cheers not during the monologue but when he walked onstage; the crowd came not for comedy but for celebrity spectacle. Carson would make three state visits a week, and the audience responded like tourists at Buckingham Palace. Leno has turned his entrance at the beginning of the show into a hand-slapping, mandatory-standing-O ritual, as if he were a pop-star Pope. The cheers for Letterman last nearly as long, and so predictably that, between the announcement of tonight’s guests and the host’s first joke, any viewer can reliably take a bathroom break and miss nothing but the rote acclaim.

“You know, when you die, we’re not gonna do this for you.” —Drew Carey to Leno, on last night’s hour-long Tonight Show tribute to Carson

Leno, a very funny standup comic before he got a desk job, built his rep on a kind of lunchpail liberalism, expressed in a wry exasperation that escalated to outrage, possibly mock, possibly not, in his 6-min. spot. That, anyway, was the persona he created in the early 80s — though on Letterman’s show, not on Carson’s, where he was persona non grata for a few years. (A clip of Leno’s maiden appearance on Carson offers a hint why: he’s wearing a wide-lapeled olive green atrocity, from the house of Calvin Klutz, and sporting as close to an Afro as someone of Italian-Scots ancestry could grow.) When Leno, after winning over the The Tonight Show naysayers, sat in for Carson as guest host, he became an equal-opportunity detractor, as if to demonstrate he was now ready for post-primetime.

But Johnny’s ratings were still high, his advertising revenue higher, his status as a TV legend secure. Those shoes were bigger than Bob Lanier’s — who, if anyone, could fill them? He had an answer: “Who could follow Carson? Well, believe me, somebody can — and will.” Leno had been designated permanent guest host in 1987; when he was subbing, the show’s ratings had often matched or surpassed Carson’s, and with higher viewership in the 18-to-49 age group that advertisers drool to reach.

Carson may have preferred to lay hands on Letterman, whose 12:35 show followed his, and who, when Carson threatened to quit Tonight in 1980, had been mentioned as most likely to succeed. Dave got the Late Night gig in 1982, and within a few years had the most widely praised show (not just talk show) on TV; he, not Carson or Leno, was the hot topic of conversation; the young people, bless ’em, loved him. Letterman was also more sympatico to Carson, and vice versa. Another Midwesterner (as also were Cavett and Mike Douglas), the Indianapolis native had revered Carson from childhood, when he’d watch Johnny get laughs by toying with contestants on Who Do You Trust? As he told TIME in 1982: “There was one guy who balanced a lawnmower on his chin — quite a booking coup — and Carson just made fun of him. I thought, ‘What a great way to make a living!'”

Now Letterman wanted to live at 11:35. But if Carson had any clout left at NBC, he didn’t use it to get Dave the job. His only indications of his preference were to avoid any mention on his final show of Leno’s succession — a simple “And I hope you’ll be as kind to Jay, who starts on Monday, as you have been to me” would have been gracious —and to appear unannounced on Dave’s show a couple of years later.

I think NBC knew that Leno was not a prima donna but a plow horse, who would honor his promise to show up five nights a week, 46 weeks a year. And they may have figured that Letterman’s acerbity — his on-camera crabbiness was what many suspected Carson was like off-camera —wouldn’t play to a broader audience looking for light entertainment right after the local news. As everyone knows, Letterman made a noisy move up the street to CBS, where he was paid twice as much as Leno and earned ratings considerably lower. Yet, even as his show became stale, he retained the critics’ loyalty. And even though, by ratings and ad revenue, Jay was the new king of late night, he had a Rodney Dangerfield odor about him. What he said in tribute to Carson last night might also have been an admission of failure: “After all these years, I still feel like a guest in his house. Because he built this house.”

A Life in Pictures
A photoessay on the life of Johnny Carson

TIME Archive
Johnny Carson in the pages of TIME over the years

TIME Collection
The best mentions of Johnny Carson in TIME’s Archive

TIME Cover
Carson made TIME’s cover in 1967

Well, that’s how it goes, And, John, I know you’re getting anxious to close. So thanks for the cheer. I hope you didn’t mind me bending your ear. For all of the years, For the laughs, for the tears, For the class that you showed, Make it one for my baby And one more for the road, That long, long road. —Bette Midler to Carson, May 22, 1992

This number from Carson’s penultimate Tonight Show broadcast, replayed frequently in the past days, was one of the few times this very dry man went moist. It brought the star to tears. OK, it brought me to tears too, but I’m a sentimental slob. Watching it again, though, as the camera switched from Bette alone to Johnny’s reaction, I saw Carson wrestling with the emotion while uncomfortable that he had to expose, or counterfeit, it in public.

At the end of the following night’s show, he said, I bid you a very heartfelt goodnight. But it was really goodbye. That was it. Carson wanted it known, and needed to prove, that showbiz wasn’t his life, it was his job. He would not permit himself the cliché of the aging star (Astaire, Callas, Merman, Clemens) who announces retirement, then keeps coming back. He followed the Garbo rule: do it as well as you can — maybe better than anyone has — and, when you’re done, disappear.

His reputation, certainly his luster, may be in danger of vanishing with him. The Honeymooners churns away on nostalgia networks 50 years after it was made; Carson’s program, apart from modestly selling video compilations, fulfilled its title — it wasn’t called The Forever Show. Dependent on topical humor and guests plugging next week’s movie, it was a candidate for a time capsule, but not for timelessness. (It didn’t help that some dolt at NBC, in a catastrophic economy move, taped over the first decade of shows.)

Zehme, the last journalist to snag an interview with the star, recalled that he spoke glowingly of Fred Allen (whose Mighty Allen Art Players, featuring sketches with continuing characters, was an obvious inspiration for the Mighty Carson Art Players), then said, “But no one today knows who Fred Allen is. Nor should they.” Time marches on, burying beneath its boots the incandescence of performers — like Allen in radio, Katherine Cornell in theater, and many luminaries of early TV — who toiled in media whose excitement was that they were live. And now, except in the fond, fragile memories of the alterkockers, they’re dead.

So he retired from The Tonight Show and from public view. He enjoyed traveling with his fourth wife Alexis, He sailed his yacht. He played poker every month or so with Steve Martin, Carl Reiner and a few other friends. But old habits die hard, so he kept two of them: writing topical gags (he sent a few to Letterman, to be used in his monologue, and contributed two short pieces, midwifed by Martin, to the New Yorker), and smoking.

Among the most prominent props on Carson’s desk in his first decade on The Tonight Show were an ashtray and a cigarette box. (One time, in a mock battle with McMahon, he blew the residue of the ashtray Ed’s way. And when Rickles, on one of Carson’s nights off, smashed the host’s precious cigarette box, Carson the next night marched into the adjacent studio, where Rickles was taping his sitcom series “C.P.O. Sharkey,” and demanded retribution from the casaba-headed comic.) Carson occasionally smoked while conducting an interview, and so did some of his guests. In nervous moments he was prone to tapping a soft paradiddle with a cigarette. Later the ashtray went on a shelf under the desk top, so that Carson could take a few puffs during commercial breaks, and the cigarette drum stick was replaced by a pencil with erasers on both ends. Yesterday you could have bought a pack of five for $30.00 on eBay.

Carson, who according to Tynan smoked a brand “more virulent and ferociously unfiltered than any other on the market” (gee — Gitanes?), hadn’t minded joking about smoking. Once his offered this light-hearted advice on longevity: “If you must smoke, don’t do it orally.” But he did it orally, apparently believing he’d live forever, because his parents had survived into their 90s, as had his father’s parents. “One thing about my family,” he told Tynan, “we have good genes.”

Well, somebody must have polluted the gene pool, possibly Carson himself. He died, much sooner than his fans suspected, from emphysema. So here’s hoping he enjoyed every one of his 79 years and his little family of vices. As he once said, “I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.”

Fate had the last laugh on America’s most vaunted host: it took him 15 years before he expected to go. But all comics know that life is unfair; if it were, they’d be out of work. On this mortal coil there’s always a banana peel; the only question is, when do you slip on it and execute your final pratfall? “If life was fair,” he once deadpanned, “Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.” Not to wish an early demise on those who followed him, imitated him, learned from him, but Carson, who ever he was, was the Elvis of late night.