Michael Hoover

The formula was so simple. Here’s how it worked: You had an awful day at the office or a tension-packed one in the classroom or the factory and you came home feeling worn out. The pressures of the day were starting to overwhelm you and the evening hours were disappearing and that meant that, shortly, you had to go to bed and begin facing the misery all over again.

What was the good of having an evening to yourself if it didn’t provide a respite from the anxieties of the day?

If you were coming of age or were of age in the three decades from the early 60’s to the early 90’s, that’s when Johnny Carson factored into the formula. If you could manage to overlook your exhaustion and to stay up until 11:30, after the late night news had run its pathetic course of even more depressing news to drag you down, you were rewarded with Ed McMahon’s hearty shout of “And Heeeere’s Johnny,” accompanied by that upbeat music and Johnny Carson fighting his way through a multicolored curtain to greet all of us with his usually great monologue. You almost hoped for it to flop because Johnny had a way of dealing with a bad set of jokes or a recalcitrant audience that was often funnier when it was going wrong. He was the quickest, most adept ad libber ever.

Johnny’s routines were a way of saying to all of us fighting to keep the devils of ennui and frustration and anxiety away, that we had an hour and a half of laughter to replenish us. It didn’t matter that it would all be over at the ungodly hour of one a.m. It didn’t matter that staying up until then only made the next day’s challenges even harder to face. All that mattered was that there was a brief time while everything else in the universe, all that would drag us down into the abyss, was put on hold while Johnny temporarily made a good part of the pain go away for 90 magical minutes.

Most of the time Johnny Carson’s jokes were sophisticated and timely and he skewered the pundits and politicians and arrogant office seekers at will, but with a delicacy that is absolutely gone in this much coarser day and age. Most of the time Johnny inherently understood the age-old dictums that instruct us all to chide without attacking, make fun without belittling, provoke laughter without hurting. In that he mirrored his mentors, Red Skelton and Bob Hope. It’s an art of restraint. Sorrowfully, it’s becoming a lost art.

I’m not a real fan of slapstick comedy, but when Johnny Carson, an artist with inspirational roots in vaudeville, donned ridiculous costumes and mimicked stereotypes and caricatures that would serve his purpose, he could take a pie in the face in a way that would make even the most slapstick-adverse fan laugh. Charlie Chaplin would have been proud of Carson’s pratfalls, distinguished as they were. If there is a heaven for comedic idols, I have no doubt that the master Chaplin is heartily greeting Mr. Carson and congratulating him on a job well done. Although Johnny Carson was nearly 80 years old, the news of his death was startling. I still pictured him as the dapper man who so smartly exited the stage before his time was done. When Carson walked away, still at the top of his game, I was always reminded of poet A. E. Housman’s lines in “To an Athlete Dying Young”: “Smart lad, to slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay.” This reference may seem strange applied to a performer who had successfully navigated decades of professional strife and achievement, yet it fits a man who walked away from fame and refused to return for fear of compromising his image.

Very, very few of the high school seniors in my English classes know who Johnny Carson was. That may not be surprising to you, but it’s simply one more piece of evidence of the inexorable passage of time.

These kids do not know what a pleasure it was to see Johnny put that envelope to his forehead as he pretended, as Carnac the Magnificent, to divine the secret answer that was in it—after all it had been stored in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnall’s porch since noon.

My high school seniors do not know what a joy it was to stay up late and have a truly rare comedian milk the day’s craziness and make funny sense out of nonsense.

These young people will soon face the identical pressures that all previous generations have faced. And when they come home from work, frustrated by the day’s anxieties, to whom will they turn for the relief that Johnny Carson provided their immediate ancestors? Conan O’Brian? Jon Stewart? Jimmy Kimmel? As much as this old guy likes these young comedians, there’s still the feeling that there’s something they all still need to learn to be as successful as the master. That lesson is that, very late at night, when the audience is enfolding itself in thick blankets of denial and protection, there needs to be someone out there who understands that humor—without malice—provides a solace that lets us face a new day refreshed.