Johnny Carson, R.I.P.

CNN is reporting that Johnny Carson, still the King of Late Night Television as far as I'm concerned, died Sunday morning of emphysema. He was 79.

(This makes a recent story, in which it was revealed that Carson, in blissful retirement, was quietly keeping his hand in by writing jokes for David Letterman, all the more poignant.)

Carson took the late-night talk show format and made it his own. He made doing late-night talk look easy, almost effortless. But it wasn't, and it isn't, and the late-night TV comedy timeline is replete with the names of everyone who thought they could do it as well, and failed. Carson beat back every contender (and there were plenty) who tried to knock him off his perch, and when he retired, he resolutely stayed out of the limelight.

Kenneth Tynan's 1978 New Yorker profile of Carson, "Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale," is definitive, and well worth checking out. The piece has been collected and reprinted many times, and can be found in the recent New Yorker profiles compilation, Life Stories.