Back in my junior high school days, because my father worked second shift and my siblings included two babies among their number, my mother took up my offer for relief and made the perhaps ill-advised decision to allow me to stay awake each night until my father's 1:00 AM return from his job.
The result was that I became a huge Johnny Carson fan. Always interested in public affairs, I loved his monologues, infused with regular references to the events of the day, as well as his occasional interviews with people like Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Few may remember that he once spent an hour-and-a-half interviewing New Orleans prosecuting attorney Jim Garrison, demolishing Garrison's notions of a conspiracy in the killing of President John F. Kennedy.)
I admired Carson's intelligence and wit and, for a time, fancied myself one day becoming a late-night talk show host. In fact, like one of Robert de Niro's sick movie characters, I even turned my bedroom into a talk show set, my sisters using the boas from their Barbie play sets to act as glamorous guests.
At school, I regaled a small group of classmates with my accounts of the previous night's edition of The Tonight Show, particularly telling them about the slightly naughty things guests like Lyn Redgrave might have said to Carson. Johnny Carson made me feel sort of hip.
I suspect that he had that effect on all who watched his show with any regularity.
In recent years, there's evidence that we, as is our penchant in America, have overdone it a bit. We may be too smart alecky for our own good. Instead of the impish tweaking of those in authority that was Carson's trademark, today's late night talkers are more like character assassins, nightly combatants in a contest to get quoted and video-clipped the next day. This one-upsmanship corrodes our social compact and defaces political debate. It contributes to cynicism.
As entertainment and information consumers, we've also become lazy. In spite of access to tons of information through the 24/7 news networks, newspapers on the web, magazines, and the occasional informative blog, polls show that increasing numbers of us rely almost exclusively on the nightly talk show monologues for news of the day.
Carson, a journalism major at the University of Nebraska and an inveterately inquisitive man, must have been appalled by that development. He himself was a consumer of news and could be thoughtfully reflective on world events.
Carson was certainly not credulous. His humor could be bitingly insightful. But he put limits on himself, never becoming mean.
As such, he's a good example of what Dwight Eisenhower's mentor Fox Connor taught should be the stance of all with authority, power, or influence: Always take your job seriously, but never yourself.
[This is a good overview of Carson's life.]
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