Or, at least, wherein we point you at someone else’s tribute. David Edelstein at Slate gets it right, and smacks down the McNews for their absurd reduction of Carson’s style and legacy:

Sometimes it’s easier to begin an appreciation by saying what a person emphatically was not. Consider this passage about Johnny Carson from an editorial in USA Today, which is wrongheaded on nearly every count:

But what made Carson so unusual wasn’t just his success, but how he achieved it. His monologues were not biting or cynical, as is often the case with today’s TV. His conversations with guests put the focus on the interviewee, not the interviewer. He didn’t win laughs at the expense of others, like Jay Leno does in his “Jaywalking” segment, which shows people unable to answer easy questions. If anyone was the butt of Carson’s humor, it was Carson himself.

You’d think that Carson was some sort of egoless saint of television, when at his peak he was precisely the oppositeÑwhich is why, of course, so many millions of us watched him so faithfully and took the news of his passing, at age 79 from emphysema, so hard.