'Tonight Show' Was the Brass Ring for Comedians

Backstage before her first appearance on "The Tonight Show" in 1985, Roseanne Barr read a letter she had written to herself years before, dreaming of this moment. "This is the beginning of your life, for She who is and is not yet," the letter said in part, as recounted in a profile of the comic by the New Yorker's John Lahr.

Much has been and will be said about how Johnny Carson "discovered" Roseanne, Ellen DeGeneres, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Garry Shandling and Robin Williams. But they all had managers and club careers by the time their debut on "The Tonight Show" happened. Carson didn't discover them; what he did was take them by the hand and say, "Here, America."

I can't think of the last time a comedian went on a talk show and, in essence, was introduced to the nation -- or even to the entertainment industry. The platform, if not the performances, no longer exists, not since Carson created it during the three decades that he ruled late night as host of the only game in town.

Carson was good for comedians, but he was even better for comedy. He created space in his show for up-and-coming talent to do their acts before a nationwide audience. He also made it an event, a showcase, for which competition was fierce (you first had to gain the hard-won approval of "The Tonight Show" talent coordinator Jim McCawley, who scouted Los Angeles clubs like a kind of prophet of either your future or your doom).

Once on the show, there were barometers to gauge whether or not you had arrived. Did Johnny give you the OK sign or even, perhaps, wave you over to the couch?

Shandling, noting in a 1991 interview with The Times that he didn't get to the couch after his first appearance, joked that "when you go to Johnny's house, you stand the first few times you are there."

It sounds somewhat officious, the lordly position that he created over the stand-up world, and there were odd undertones of betrayal to the attempts by Joan Rivers and Arsenio Hall to have competing late-night shows, to say nothing of the Shakespearean drama that unfolded before "The Tonight Show" went to Jay Leno instead of Carson's favored son, Letterman.

Whatever was happening backstage, the rewards for the viewer were tangible. If Carson functioned as a paterfamilias for new comics, he got cheerfully and shrewdly out of the way of the established ones -- usually because Carson thought they were a riot and wanted to continue to interact with them. In this way, he taught us how to appreciate a comic, to intuit his appreciation, whether the act was Steven Wright or Don Rickles or Rodney Dangerfield or Rivers -- among the comedians, as I recall it, who had the ability to reduce Carson to tears.