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Johnny Carson, America's Late-Night Host, Dies at 79
By RICHARD SEVERO (The New York Times)
Johnny Carson, the droll, easy-going comedian who dominated late-night television for 30 years, becoming a national institution tucking millions of Americans into bed as the host of The Tonight Show, has died, NBC announced today. He was 79 years old.
The cause was emphysema.
Mr. Carson took over The Tonight Show from Jack Paar on Oct. 1, 1962, and, preferring to retire at the top of his game, voluntarily surrendered it to Jay Leno on May 22, 1992. During those three decades, between 10 million and 15 million Americans could not sleep weeknights unless they were reassured by the durable and droll Mr. Carson. The critic Bill McKibben called him the "nation’s emotional thermostat, readjusting our mood every night so we could go to sleep. Billy Wilder, the film director and wit, regarded him as the valium and Nembutal of the nation.
During his reign, Mr. Carson was one of the most powerful performers on television, discovering new talent, rescuing old performers from oblivion and earning millions of dollars for his network, the National Broadcasting Company. In his heyday he generated approximately 17 percent of the network’s total profit and was, by any reasonable assessment, its most lustrous star since Toscanini. He held an overwhelming majority of the late-night viewers in the palm of his hand and his show was the biggest single money-maker in NBC history.
In a celebrated New Yorker profile, Kenneth Tynan said of Mr. Carson that he practiced the art of the expected. Americans were reassured when Doc Severinsen, the show’s bandleader, would start up the show’s bouncy theme song (written by Paul Anka and Mr. Carson himself), Ed McMahon, the jovial announcer, would intone Heeeeere’s Johnny and prepare to guffaw at every joke Mr. Carson ever told, and the dapper host would appear to deliver his nightly monologue, a tour de force that the critic Les Brown called America’s bedtime story.
In his monologue and in his time, Mr. Carson impaled the foibles of seven presidents and their aides (Vice President Dan Quayle was a favorite target), as well as the doings of assorted nabobs and stuffed shirts from the private sector: corporate footpads and secret polluters, tax evaders, preening lawyers, idiosyncratic doctors, oily accountants, defendants who got off too easy and celebrities who talked too much.
All these oddments were sliced and diced so neatly, so politely, so unmaliciously, with so much alacrity, that even the stuffiest conservative Republicans found themselves almost smiling at Carson’s Nixon-Agnew jokes and uptight doctrinaire liberal Democrats savored his pokes at Lyndon B. Johnson and the Kennedy's. The public could not say whether they were on Johnny Carson’s side or he was on theirs. All they knew was they liked him and felt they knew him, an audacious claim not even his wives and next door neighbors cared to make. White, male and Protestant, Mr. Carson’s scrubbed Midwestern presence was so appealing that he succeeded in unifying a fractious nation that otherwise seemed ununifiable.
Just as frequently Mr. Carson turned his agile wit on himself: on his numerous unsuccessful marriages and pricey divorces; his powerlessness at the hands of Con Edison workers who worked under his apartment window on Manhattan’s East Side when he tried to sleep (he claimed they were carting New York away, piece by piece, to New Jersey); and on his vulnerability to the people who employed him.
Mr. Carson guarded his political views as carefully as he did his private life, insisting that the only message of his show was entertainment. But his credibility with the American public was such that his monologues were carefully monitored by politicians mindful that no politician who became a frequent target of Johnny Carson could long survive in public life. It did not help Richard Nixon when Mr. Carson’s monologue produced some of the funniest Watergate jokes around. Nor did it help when Mr. Carson trained his sights on former Senator Gary Hart, a Democrat from Colorado who found allure in both the presidency and in women he did not happen to be married to. Mr. Carson’s jokes about Mr. Hart’s extramarital activities were surely not the only reason his political fortunes evaporated in 1992 but they were repeated often enough to have played some part.
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Olivia's Note: I would personally like to say that this comes as a shock to all Americans everywhere, and Johnny you will be missed. Thanks for all of the great laughs over the years. May you rest in peace.
Until next time, God Bless! -Olivia
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