[Elspode]

I'm actually old enough to remember late night television before Johnny Carson. Flickers of Jack Paar bounce around inside my head now and again, and by the time Steve Allen came along with his more slapstick, Everyman form of show, I was hooked...at all of eight years old.

When the new guy came along, I was sad to see my buddy "Steve Rat", leave the show (I called him Steve Rat because "rat" was just about as bad a thing as you could call people on TV back then...no one ever said "ass" or "dick" or any of the other things that fly freely across today's airwaves). Who was this Carson guy, anyway?

I didn't know it, and probably my late-night loving parents didn't either, but the plucky Nebraska kid was destined to become the standard by which all late night - or rather, *all* television talk shows - would be judged. With a standup comedian's style, a vaudevillian's facial expressions, and a personality that often reminded me of Jack Benny, Johnny Carson brought to the relatively young talk show format a perfectly tailored style, a quick wit and a sense of inclusion of the viewer that no one had ever before been able to muster.

Watching Johnny do his show was always a bit like being let in on something. When he chatted with guests, it seemed to me as though I was being allowed to listen in at a party, rather than viewing something from an audience. The opening comedic monologue, now a staple no talk show would ever do without, was brought to the fore by Johnny Carson. A brilliant gag writer, Carson would regale his audience with topical humor about politics, famous persons, national events and his own observations on life, and leave you laughing in the aisles every time.

I was fortunate enough, as a boy of 13, to see Johnny Carson do his stand up act in Las Vegas. For 50 minutes, he had my youthful funnybone screaming for mercy. I literally cried with laughter as Johnny spun tales of his country youth, the crazy world of show business, and just about anything else you might imagine. After the show, my father and I went to coffee shop of the hotel for dessert, and there, two booths over, sat Johnny, Doc Severinsen and their wives (Doc had opened the show for Johnny in Vegas, as on TV, with his amazing trumpet playing and incredible band). It was as close as I've ever come to running over to someone famous and making a fool of myself by gushing all over them. Even then, he was The Man, the kingpin, the maker and breaker of careers.

It is probably difficult to overstate the importance of being a performer and being seen on The Tonight Show when it was in its heyday. Getting asked to appear was a sign you'd arrived in the world of entertainment; for young comedians, being invited to sit on the couch next to Johnny after your "Five" was like being blessed by the Pope himself. And Johnny made the careers of many of the world's top comedians by dint of their appearances alongside him, including the career of his successor, Jay Leno.

News reports in recent days related that Johnny had been sending jokes to David Letterman in the years since retiring from the Tonight Show. It seems that Letterman was Johnny's choice to take over The Tonight Show. Carson's still-fertile comic mind couldn't pick up a newspaper without thinking of four or five good jokes about what he'd read, so he sent them along to Dave by way of being supportive of the guy who he saw as still being closest to the format which he himself had originated. Sadly, on the heels of this story, comes today's news that Johnny Carson has passed, a victim of emphysema at age 79.

Immortality is a dicey proposition at best. Sometimes a person is made memorable by dint of being an ass. Sometimes we have them ingrained in our minds because they are generous, or pious, or attractive. Johnny is an immortal, because no one, *no one*, can ever hope to do what he did better than he did it. In a field with many contenders, Carson is the 500 pound gorilla, the acme of what a talk show host can and should be.

No matter how many talk show hosts come and go, no matter how funny, endearing, controversial, marriage-prone, wealthy, eccentric or well-dressed they are, they can only aspire to be what Johnny Carson was to the average American television viewer. He was the man in our living rooms - nay, our *bedrooms* - smiling at us, talking to us, making us laugh our asses off. He was the guy who had a small furry mammal jump on his head and pee, he was the turbaned Karnak, blowing open envelopes to read the question to the answer he had just intuited, and making us howl with the result. He was the guy who could insult Ed McMahon about being a drunk and never make us feel like he'd hurt anyone's feelings. He made the style and color of Doc's shirts a running joke, he 'koochie-koochied' alongside Charo, did the soft shoe with the Rat Pack, and when he went home, he looked up at the stars through his Celestron 14 telescope and dreamed of other worlds.

Johnny Carson was a singular human being, an icon, a deserved legend...the retired, reigning, undefeated, untied King of Late Night. God save the King.