So ends an era

Johnny CARSON, who died Sunday at his home in Malibu, didn’t invent the late-night talk show -- he inherited “The Tonight Show” from Jack Paar, who inherited it from Steve Allen -- but he made it an institution, and with three decades at its helm, became one himself in the bargain. So bound up was the host with his show that it was (informally) “The Johnny Carson Show,” even when Carson wasn’t hosting it, and -- apart from an occasional cameo or nightclub appearance or hosting of the Oscars -- he did little else after taking it over in 1962, at the age of 36, and virtually nothing else after leaving it, 30 years later.

It’s the rare person who merits the word “institution.” It isn’t enough to have been good at something. One must stand for a web of cultural effects, and have stood for them over a long period of time, and represented a moment in history in such a way that one’s individual passing spells the end of an era. (Jay Leno, who occupies Carson’s old seat, is not an institution -- he merely inhabits one.) Performers like Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire, each the ne plus ultra of not only an art but of a historical moment, took worlds with them when they left.

Carson’s end was sneakier. The most private of public figures -- “Johnny packs a tight suitcase,” sidekick Ed McMahon told Nora Ephron for a 1968 biography -- his absence from view seemed paradoxically to mean that he would go on forever, presiding like a watchful god over the form he more than anyone created and codified. (It was something of a shock to learn that he would have turned 80 this year.)

Unlike with Sinatra or Astaire, there weren’t a multitude of old movies, reruns or CDs to keep him alive in the public mind, yet his influence is everywhere, multiplied through a legion of talk show hosts (and sidekicks, bandleaders, couches), each of whom owes him a debt. He is the Platonic ideal of late-night talk-show host, of whom all other late-night talk-show hosts are but imperfect reflections. His influence extends even beyond the borders of the actual, as he is the model as well for Garry Shandling’s talk show and Jerry Langford, the character played by Jerry Lewis in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.”

My own memories of “The Tonight Show” are tied to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when it was a treat to stay up late and see what the adults were doing. The show then was, among other things, a forum for a passing generation of great comics -- the likes of Jack Benny and Bob Hope and Groucho Marx, who, like Carson, were usually funnier ad-libbing than reading scripted material. Given the volume of material on the nightly show, and the speed with which it had to be produced, it was a given that much would fail, and making fun of the failures became a routine in itself.

I do not remember a single joke Carson ever told, but I can say with some certainty that he was funny -- and more than funny, he was fun. (Though one detected a sort of sternness lurking deeper within.) He was the definition of the perfect host -- one who puts his guests at ease, who becomes part of his own party, who makes the mechanics of fun invisible. Like David Letterman, he was a hip Midwesterner, obviously smart but not off-puttingly intellectual, a one-of-a-kind regular guy, who dressed well but not too well.

Carson was serious about his work -- his senior thesis was about how to write comedy -- but above all he had the capacity to be delighted, which created an atmosphere of delight. Mostly, I remember him laughing. It was this quality of total enjoyment that made Carson’s departure from the air, as now from the world, seem outrageously premature.