July 28, 2025 Issue

Stephen Colbert, in this week’s issue, writes about one of my all-time favorite New Yorker profiles – Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” (February 20, 1978), an indelible portrait of Johnny Carson. Colbert delivers some great lines, most of which mock the twenty-thousand-word length of Tynan’s piece. For example:

My doctor says the words were clogging my carotid, and, after reading “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” I need a statin.

That article is twenty thousand words. Let me repeat that: words. Can anyone read that much Tynan without adopting his native tongue wag?

And Tynan liberally salts his voluminous causerie (!) with references unassociated with current (and what he might deem intellectually jejune) late night: Keats, Rabelais, Ezra Pound, and Hieronymus Bosch, though one can imagine H.B. appreciating the earthly delights of Floyd Turbo, Art Fern, and Carnac the Magnificent.

Where now is the audience for ten verbal tons on the King of Late Night? Where is that Kingdom? 

Here is something Kenneth could have learned from Johnny: fewer words.

Fewer words? No way! Tynan’s piece is perfect as is. Colbert acknowledges this (“Tynan is a great writer, and it’s a great read”), but then asks “Was he right for the job?” It seems that Colbert prefers one-liners to extraordinary essays. He says, “Tynan bakes a tasty meringue, but I prefer the Good Humor Man.”

Well, I’m here to say that Tynan provides both. Example of the tasty meringue:

He [Fred de Cordova, Carson’s producer] is a large, looming, beaming man with horn-rimmed glasses, an Acapulcan tan, and an engulfing handshake that is a contract in itself, complete with small print and an option for renewal on both sides.

Example of the Good Humor Man:

“Another time, he asked Fernando Lamas why he’d gone into movies, and Lamas said, ‘Because it was a great way to meet broads.’ I loved Johnny’s comeback. He just nodded and said, ‘Nietzsche couldn’t have put it more succinctly.’ ” [Quote from interview with Ed McMahon]

It also contains brilliant descriptions of Carson’s cool, quick-witted, comedic style:

Tone of monologue is skeptical, tongue-in-cheek, ironic. Manner: totally relaxed, hitting bull’s-eyes without seeming to take aim, TV’s embodiment of “Zen in the Art of Archery.” In words uttered to me by the late screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, “Carson has a delivery like a Winchester rifle.” Theme: implicitly liberal, but careful to avoid the stigma of leftism. The unexpected impromptus with which he rescues himself from gags that bomb, thereby plucking triumph from disaster, are also part of the expected pleasure. “When it comes to saving a bad line, he is the master”—to quote a tribute paid in my presence by George Burns. Carson registers a gag’s impact with instant, seismographical finesse. If the laugh is five per cent less than he counted on, he notes the failure and reacts to it (“Did they clear the hall? Did they have a drill?”) before any critic could, usually garnering a double-strength guffaw as reward. Whatever spoils a line—ambiguous phrasing, botched timing, faulty enunciation—he is the first to expose it. Nobody spots flaws in his own work more swiftly than Carson, or capitalizes on them more effectively. Query: Is this becoming a dangerous expertise? In other words, out from under how many collapsed jokes can you successfully climb?

Colbert, in his piece, shows himself to be an excellent writer. I love this line:

From Hollywood to the Hasty Pudding, we waft like smoke from an unfiltered Pall Mall through Carson’s worlds, most of which are gone. 

Carson’s world is gone, but if you want to revisit it, read Tynan’s superb “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” – ten verbal tons of pure pleasure. 

Postscript: “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” is collected in Tynan’s 1980 Show People, a wonderful compendium of his New Yorker profiles, including his masterpiece “The Girl in the Black Helmet” (on Louise Brooks). Curiously, his later, much more comprehensive collection Profiles (1989) includes all his New Yorker work, except “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale.”