E-Mail This Article to a Friend IN MEMORIAM Johnny Carson, 1925–2005 BY JOYCE MILLMAN

Johnny Carson did not pioneer late-night television; his Tonight Show predecessors Steve Allen and Jack Paar did that. But Carson, who died of emphysema on January 23 at the age of 79, leaves an equally weighty legacy. As host of The Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992, Carson created the modern late-night-TV comic sensibility.

Carson’s humor was a little racy, a little silly (with characters such as Carnac the Magnificent, bogus seer, and Art Fern, sleazy TV pitchman), often self-deflating, and smartly topical. He held forth with a peerless intimacy that made us feel as if it were closing time with nobody in the joint but him and us (oh, all right, and Ed McMahon). Later, David Letterman added irony (and snarkiness) to the late-night mix, and Conan O’Brien brought giggly surrealism. Saturday Night Live’s "Weekend Update" (and, more ambitiously, The Daily Show) enlarged upon Carson’s stinging "in the news" monologues. But it all goes back to Johnny.

Last Sunday, surfing through the Carson tributes on the cable news channels, I caught a clip from a 1988 Tonight Show on which then–Arkansas governor Bill Clinton — who had just bombed at the Democratic National Convention with an interminable keynote speech — was a guest. A deadpan Carson mocked Clinton’s verbosity by giving him an introduction that went on — hilariously — for three minutes and 41 seconds. When Clinton finally came on, Carson asked, "How are you?" and slammed an hourglass down on the desk. That clip was a startling illustration of the dash and daring of Carson’s humor — no, Jon Stewart did not invent the art of puncturing political pomposity.

Born in Iowa and raised in Nebraska, Carson articulated an old-fashioned Midwestern skepticism about politicians, bureaucrats, and those who didn’t have a lick of common sense. His monologue zinged those in need of zinging, and his jokes were accessible without treating the audience like idiots. Carson never tipped his hand politically. And it was this illusion of impartiality that enabled him to take unrelenting jabs at President Nixon in the late 1960s and early ’70s and yet not alienate viewers during that era of intense political and generational division. Carson was one of the transformative pop-cultural figures of our time. He showed the so-called silent majority that it was okay to question authority. And it’s not a stretch to say that his monologues helped usher in a new "throw the bums out" attitude in American politics. Throughout those chaotic times, Carson’s Tonight Show held the center, even as he nudged it to the left. Walter Cronkite read the news; Johnny Carson read our minds about the news. With no real late-night competitors, Carson’s was the last voice you heard before sleep, and it was a voice of sanity, showing us the absurd humor in a troubling world.

When Carson gave up his crown in 1992 and walked off into implacable, reclusive retirement, the turbulent fight to succeed him was almost Shakespearean. Carson made no secret that Letterman, another Midwestern boy, was his favored heir. But NBC gave the chair to the eager Jay Leno, whose soulless, dumbed-down Tonight Show — the Wal-Mart of late-night TV — is the current ratings champ. Only last week, it was revealed that Carson was still sending Letterman jokes for the latter’s monologues. Letterman issued an emotional tribute to Carson on Sunday that read in part, "All of us who came after are pretenders. We will not see the likes of him again.... A night doesn’t go by that I don’t ask myself, ‘What would Johnny have done?’ "

Those words have haunted late-night talk-show hosts since Carson’s retirement. Letterman came close to equaling Carson’s reassuring late-night voice of reason in his extraordinary post–September 11 show, when he sat at his desk and spoke directly to viewers, as if together we could make sense of things. But Letterman has since allowed himself to get caught up in political polarization, snarling about President Bush from one corner while, in the opposing corner, the aggressively accommodating Leno flatters Laura Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Maybe this is what Letterman means when he admits his own shortcomings and says there will never be another Carson. The TV audience is fragmented to demographic smithereens now. But back then, Carson persuaded 12 million of us a night (Leno averages half that) to laugh at the same joke or observation or goofy "baby marmoset sits on Johnny’s head" moment, and to feel we were part of the same wonderful whole. Johnny Carson was the rarest of entertainers, one who led us to common ground not by lowering the bar, but by lifting us up.