Daily Blague

At the risk of being ridden out of town on a rail, I have to say that I will not miss Johnny Carson. Indeed, I haven't missed him in years. He was one of the first to teach me, inadvertently of course, that watching television is an often pernicious waste of time.

Tribute writers at the Times speak of Carson's having been "gentle," "brilliant," and (on television only) likeable. What I saw instead was a leveling hostility to passion, particularly to the passion of intellectual engagement. Carson was a past master at ridiculing strong feelings and showing them up as laughably lunatic. His presentation, paradoxically for a widely-seen program, reflected a deep Midwestern mistrust of the outstanding. His set was a drab American living room in which everyone was required to be "fun" (not "funny") and "nice." It's worth noting that the core of Carson's style of humor was understatement and winking silence. 

In large part, the Tonight Show was an infomercial for entertainers, who typically appeared at Johnny Carson's desk whenever they were about to do something new, such as open in a Los Vegas hotel. The audience for these announcements was not the one sitting in the studio or the other one watching at home, it was the world of other entertainers and their agents, handlers, &c who could take note of the competition's success. For the vast majority of viewers who never made it to Las Vegas to see the new act, the entertainers who paraded across Tonight's screen were famous because that's where they were, on Johnny Carson. When the Tonight Show became the source of celebrity, it was clear that circuits of significance would inevitably close. There would be no need for broadcasters to report on or assess events occurring elsewhere when they could present televised events as inherently the most meaningful.

Johnny Carson's deadpan officiated at this interment of vitality. He took a show that was broadcast live from New York and transformed it into a routine that was taped in Burbank. I will agree with the encomia on one count: at whatever cost to the American imagination, Johnny Carson made himself very wealthy.