Copious Notes

Ed McMahon and Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1992. Photo by Douglas C. Pizac | AP.

With the latest changing of the guard at The Tonight Show we were once again chatting about late night talk hosts, asking the question, could anyone truly replace Johnny Carson?

But the obituaries Tuesday morning brought a reminder of late night’s truly irreplaceable man: Ed McMahon.

Yes, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Kimmel have all comanded the desk of a late night chat show and millions have watched. But none of them has had an Ed McMahon.

Leno and Letterman each used their bandleaders as foils. Jimmy Fallon is currently out there on his own in his new Late Night gig, and could desperately use an Ed or Tina Fey — his old Weekend Update partner on Saturday Night Live. O’Brien has come closest to an Ed with Andy Richter, who actually performed an Ed-like role at the beginning of O’Brien’s Late Night gig, and has returned as the announcer for O’Brien on Tonight.

But even Conan acknowledged that there’s been nothing like Ed’s straight man to Johnny — and sometimes vice versa.

“Sitting alongside Johnny, Ed was an indelible part of what I think is the most iconic two-shot in television history,” O’Brien said on Tuesday’s Tonight Show. “It’s impossible for anyone to imagine the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson without Ed McMahon.”

And it is. Think about Carnac the Magnificent, and Ed is there. Think about any Johnny Carson skit, and Ed was there. He was a star who never really threatened to eclipse his star. He created a role and perfected it.

Johnny has had numerous successors. Ed has yet to be succeeded.

Conan O'Brien at the Tonight Show desk, Monday. Photo by Paul Drinkwater | NBC.

In a way, Dave won.

Sort of.

Back in 1992, Johnny Carson was leaving The Tonight Show desk, and the battle was between genial comedian Jay Leno and scrappy David Letterman, whose Late Night followed Tonight, to take over the hosting gig. NBC opted for the relatively safe choice of Leno, who had his own-shtick, but didn’t really divert Tonight from it’s easygoing, mid-American tone — none of that Letterman goofiness, like dropping watermelons off buildings.

David Letterman on The Late Show in 2008, sporting his "strike beard," to show solidarity with the writers' strike. Photo by John Paul Filo | CBS.

Meanwhile, Letterman bolted NBC to launch an 11:30 talker on CBS that, though it still trails Tonight in the ratings, is the only late night talk show to successfully directly compete with Tonight.

Replacing him on Late Night was Conan O’Brien, who continued that late, late goofball aesthetic with the non sequiturs, idiosyncratic skits and off-beat stars and musical guests. So, with Conan making the move to Tonight, would he be Conan-lite, for the earlier hour, or bring the after-midnight vibe to 11:30.

The answer started coming pretty quick on his debut, Monday night. The show opened with O’Brien sitting in a New York office going over a check list of things he needed to do before his new show got started. When he hit the last item, “Move to L.A.,” it started a montage of O’Brien running across the country, making stops at Wrigley Field and — first non sequitur — dropping by a doll shop for a detailed discussion of doll hair.

When O’Brien arrived at the studio , we saw that he had forgotten his keys back in the Big Apple, so he knocked down the door with a tractor.

The introductions brought a flurry of familiar faces for Late Night with Conan O’Brien fans, including original Late Night sidekick Andy Richter as the Tonight Show announcer and Max Weinberg now heading up the Tonight Show Orchestra, which plays a variation on O’Brien’s Late Night theme.

O’Brien started the show with a reliably funny monologue, saying he figured he had timed things perfectly by staying with a last-place network, moving to a bankrupt state to host a show sponsored by General Motors. Quite a bit of humor focused on Conan moving from New York to Los Angeles for The Tonight Show, and then he launched another video segment that showed while this production may have a little more SoCal cool than Late Night, it is very much Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show.

In the bit, he commandeered a tour tram at Universal Studios, where his Tonight Show is taped. The ride included driving the tram in circles with the passengers chanting, “Circle! Circle!” and Conan directing the tram out onto the streets where he, among other things, stopped at a dollar store to get something for everyone.

When he came out of the segment and the studio audience was chanting “Circle! Circle!,” Conan was clearly in his comfort zone.

If O’Brien stays on this course, it will signal the biggest stylistic shift for The Tonight Show in 47 years, save for dropping from 90 to 60 minutes. It sort of feels like a generational change for those of us that liked and appreciated The Tonight Show, but viewed Late Night as our own.

On Late Night with David Letterman, Dave used Tonight’s basic format, but injected it with a hip, irreverent and frequently abrasive humor all his own. When O’Brien took over for Letterman, he kept that vibe going, and in some ways perfected it.

Now that O’Brien has made to the Late Night-to-Tonight move many anticipated for Letterman nearly two decades ago, and has done it staying true to himself, that Letterman aesthetic truly dominates after-hours chatter.

With O’Brien’s ascension, Letterman probably has lost any hope of ever hosting the flagship late-night talk show. But as he looks across the dial at Conan’s Tonight Show, he can take some satisfaction in knowing he changed the genre.

My Twitter home page. Look for me @copiousnotes.

The video service Hulu, we are told in its advertising campaign, is “an evil plot to destroy the world.”

That might be — he says, having been sucked into hours of watching ­reruns of Saturday Night Live and WKRP in Cincinnati.

But to listen to some people, you’d think Twitter was the one pulling the planet apart, 140 characters at a time.

David Letterman was at least ­honest in his dressing-down of ­Twitter on his April 24 show: “When you don’t ­understand anything, and you’re ­frightened by things, then you make fun of it, you ridicule it, and that’s what I’m doing. I have no idea what it is, but I’ll tell you this: I don’t like it.”

Funny — and funnier if you saw Dave deliver it in his cranky-old-man fashion.

It’s more annoying when you hear clueless comments. For instance, on NPR’s Weekend Edition on April 26, This I Believe co-producer Jay ­Allison compared his series of essays about faith to several Internet upstarts: “I think that separates it from Twitter and blogging and Facebook. It’s not a chronicle of what’s happening in that moment. It’s something that’s gathered over the course of an entire life.”

Yes, but neither I nor ­anyone else I know of has ever equated jotting a quick note with writing a memoir.

Lumping Twitter with an essay, or even ­blogging and Facebook, shows a ­fundamental lack of ­understanding of what ­Twitter is — and of the ­curiosity to find out.

(By the way, NPR has a Twitter account, churning out headlines on a regular basis.)

It’s not that hard to learn what Twitter is. As Internet applications go, it is one of the easiest out there.

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