Asked how he became a star, Mr. Carson once replied, “I started in a gaseous state and then I cooled.”

As regular readers know (or have guessed), my husband is older than I am, by seventeen years. The age difference doesn’t come up as often as you might expect, but when it does it’s usually in conjunction with some artifact or association from one of our childhoods. As adults we have a lot in common; as kids we were completely different. Mr. Tingle grew up in the South, watching “Sky King,” “Bonanza,” “Gunsmoke,” and “Lassie” — Woodstock happened when he was 15, and it’s in photos from this period that he starts looking like he’s wandered off the set of Easy Rider. Meanwhile, your friend CAAF grew up in Wisconsin, attentively watching “Loveboat,” “Facts of Life,” and “Charlie’s Angels” — Duran Duran happened when I was 15, and it’s about that time that I begin to look in pictures like the survivor of an explosion at the Benetton factory. What one of us remembers fondly, the other is likely not to remember at all.

There is one overlap, of course: Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.” Mr. Tingle used to watch Johnny while waiting for his mom to come home from working the second shift. I don’t remember why I was up that late as a kid, just that I often was, and that I found the routine of the show immensely comforting. That opening music, the “Heeeeeeere’s Johnny,” the pantomimed golf swing to end the monologue, the greeting of Doc, the jabs about Ed’s drinking: These were all unvarying marks to be hit night after night. (In its adherence to ritual the show had the tonic qualities of a late-night “Mister Rogers.” Just replace the donning of the cardigan with a ba-dum-bump riff about a bad divorce.)

The main reason I watched “The Tonight Show,” though, is because I thought it was funny. Not always-always funny. Sometimes the jokes were stale and everyone involved a little glazed over, as if they’d rather have been on the golf course. But reliably enough to seem now like a miracle of entertainment. What I didn’t notice then but appreciate now is how low-key the proceedings were, how steady the patter (like a verbal softshoe), how considerate and oddly courtly Carson’s presence was.

Today, as I read obituaries and old profiles of Carson, I noticed that a lot of the most perspicacious comments about the entertainer were taken from a New Yorker profile written by the great Kenneth Tynan in 1978. It was, for example, Tynan who first observed that Carson practiced “the art of the expected.” And it was Tynan who wrote of his subject, “It is only fair to remember that he does not pretend to be a pundit, employed to express his own opinions. Rather, he is a professional explorer of other people’s egos.”

Unfortunately, I don’t have Show People, the collection of Tynan’s essays that contains the Carson profile (though I just ordered it from Alibris!). But I was able to look up the writing of the piece in the index of Tynan’s diaries. What emerges from the various mentions is a great little narrative arc — revealing of both Carson and Tynan as well as the old New Yorker.

First mention, in 1976:

14 March

I write to Mr Shawn, enclosing a list of twelve people from whom to choose the six I shall write about for The New Yorker. They are: Pinter, Stoppard, Shirley MacLaine, Irving Lazar, Bob Kaufman, Peter Sellers, John Curry, Mel Brooks, George Burns, Johnny Carson (No.1 on my list), Robert de Niro, and Ralph Richardson. (When I asked Mr Shawn why the magazine no longer published critical profiles, he said (a) that although it has published ‘playful’ or satirical profiles, they had never been really hostile, and (b) that he simply shrank from the idea of destroying people in print and would rather leave that to other magazines. For him, merely to be ignored by The New Yorker is punishment enough. It’s interesting that he wouldn’t think of publishing pieces about people whose careers were in decline: and that he refused to consider Gore Vidal a worthy subject for a New Yorker profile.)

Later in 1976, Tynan moved to Hollywood with his wife Kathleen and their children. John Lahr, who edited the diaries, notes that the Tynans were living stylishly and “beyond their means.” Lahr writes: “The New Yorker had thrown him a lifeline by paying him $44,000 for six profiles (and, more important, the magazine covered his medical expenses). Despite his increasing decrepitude, Tynan produced his classic study of Louise Brooks and fine appreciations of Johnny Carson, Mel Brooks and Sir John Richardson.”

Next mention, 1978:

8 January

A sad and rainy Christmas. In the following week I finish my Carson piece — around 25,000 words — while bank account dwindles to under-zero and (due to an accounting error committed by my secretary) cheques begin to bounce. After a week of suspense, Mr Shawn calls. He thinks the piece ’stunning’ and ‘marvellous’ and promises an immediate cheque to tide me over. It arrives ($15,000).

Next mention:

17 February

My Carson profile has appeared in The New Yorker. Fear the editing process has ironed out much that might have made it identifiably mine; also, when writing for the magazine, one automatically censors audacious phrases lest they should be demolished by the inquisitorial logicians on 43rd Street. Piece contains, moreover, far too many facts and figures and quotes and far too little analysis and interpretation — result of too much research.

Re-reading Boswell’s Johnson, I find this, from the doctor’s ‘Meditations’ in 1764, when he was fifty-five:

My indolence … has sunk into grosser sluggishness, and my dissipation spread into wilder negligence. My thoughts have been clouded with sensuality: and, except that from the beginning of this year I have, in some measure, forborne excess of strong drink, my appetites have predominated over my reason. A kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year; and perceive that incidents and intelligence pass over me without leaving any impression.

Exactly.

Then there is this description, written a few months later, of a party at Carson’s home:

1 April

Someone asked me what the food was like at the Carson party. Found myself saying, ‘The caviare was served out of a milk-churn with a soup-ladle—chuckwagon style. Then there was salmon in aspic with a TWA boarding pass in its mouth to show that it had just been flown in.’

(As many of you will remember, Tynan’s diaries were excerpted in The New Yorker a few years ago. I’ve looked for a link but can’t find one — if you know it, please leave in the Comments. I’ll just add that the diaries are pretty indispensable and worth a read — vicious, louche, heartbreaking, and brilliant. You know, all the good stuff.)