Johnny Carson, the ghost of comedy past

On a recent holiday visit to my parents' house, I found myself catching up with an old friend. It had been a while since I’d seen him, but he was just as I remembered: the requisite suit and tie, the close-cropped white hair, the boyish grin, the mischievous wit breaking through the professional demeanor. It was surprisingly easy, watching those “Tonight Show” reruns with my father, to feel a cozy nostalgia for a time when we all partook of the same vast, unifying monoculture, when so many of us made sense of the day’s events by filtering them through the sensibility of a polite Midwesterner named Johnny Carson.

No doubt my nostalgia has something to do with the fact that Carson’s reign as late-night king ended around the same time as my childhood. During my last few years of high school, I stayed up to catch him whenever I could, awed by his seemingly effortless command of his audience and guests, an authority worn so lightly you barely noticed it, even when he employed it to restore order to a show gone off the rails. And like millions of others, I tuned in to say a wistful goodbye when he signed off for good on May 22, 1992.

The long goodbye

There was a lot I didn’t understand back then: about life, about Carson, about comedy. While I knew that Carson’s retirement heralded “the end of an era” — his “Tonight Show” tenure spanned 30 years, after all — what I didn’t realize was how much had already changed. Carson’s gentle mockery of American moral norms presupposed a world in which the Protestant Christian mainstream upholding those norms still held sway. But while we laughed at Carson’s winking jokes about divorce, sex, and the Hollywood lifestyle, the acid bath of the 1960s counterculture did its work, slowly dissolving the church and other apparently vestigial institutions until all that remained was a vague ethos of “personal growth” as vapid as it was hedonistic.

If Carson failed to pick up on this, his successors didn’t. Every weeknight for the last decade of the Carson era, David Letterman followed his mentor’s sophisticated insouciance with the detached irony of a generation for whom all norms were hoaxes. As Letterman grew in popularity, the two audiences diverged: one sought solace in laughter, the other in the satisfaction of being in on the joke.

Ancient history

This tension famously came to a head when it was time to name Carson’s successor, and the upstart turned heir apparent lost out to his far more conventional rival, the uninspired but dogged Jay Leno. A similar, even uglier power struggle occurred 15 years later, when Leno refused to honor his promise to hand over the “Tonight Show” to Conan O’Brien. In both cases the “safe” choice prevailed, much to the chagrin of a highly vocal, self-appointed elite class of comedy enjoyers.

From the vantage point of 2023, such disagreements over the nature and purpose of humor can seem as distant and esoteric as medieval theology. Letterman has mellowed with age, as has O’Brien; at the same time, the internet has made their trademark self-awareness the cultural default. Current “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon can be even more of a smarmy company man than Leno ever was, while still understanding the absurdist appeal of kitschy pop culture references and stale showbiz patter.

Today’s tightly stage-managed guest segments offer little hope that someone may do or say something interesting, although it hardly matters. Anyone seeking more authentic, unfiltered speech from their favorite personalities will long ago have gravitated to their social media posts and podcast appearances. Like the monologues and the goofy, slapdash sketches, the celebrity sit-downs serve as a familiar bedtime ritual for the dwindling set of Americans who prefer to fall asleep in front of their TVs instead of underneath their phones. The only captive audiences left are those who submit by choice; for them the promise of comfort is worth far more than the possibility of adventure.

Here's Dave!

For those of us still scavenging the wastelands, trustworthy guides are few and far between. The closest thing to leadership comes from Dave Chappelle, the comic who best reflects the spirit of our exhausted age. Where Carson smirked and Letterman sneered, Chappelle sighs. His setups wander as if searching for a punch line to make sense of all that came before. When those punch lines come, they are inevitably tinged with melancholy. Chappelle doesn’t make his observations with the collegial bewilderment of Jerry Seinfeld or the confrontational bluster of Bill Hicks. Instead, his delivery evokes nothing so much as an exasperated teacher pleading with his thick-witted students to understand.

What’s funny about Chappelle is his tacit awareness of how redundant his chosen profession has become; these days everybody plays the fool. And why not? Tearing down hierarchies gets far more attention than the quiet, day-to-day labor of maintaining them. But sooner or later we’ll run out of imposing edifices to destroy. Then the only thing left to laugh at will be the foibles of those trying to remain human in the ruins.