Stephen Colbert on Kenneth Tynan's "Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale"

When Mr. Remnick asked me to write a seven-hundred-and-twenty-five-word Take on Kenneth Tynan’s 1978 Profile of Johnny Carson, I said, “My honor, cher David.” (New Yorker editors love when you use foreign words. They’re weak for anything italicized. Anything.) “I write a late-night show. I eat seven hundred words for breakfast.” In actuality, I host a late-night show and have a low-glycemic smoothie for breakfast. My doctor says the words were clogging my carotid, and, after reading “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” I need a statin.

- By Stephen Colbert

That article is twenty thousand words. Let me repeat that: words. Can anyone read that much Tynan without adopting his native tongue wag? Can I possibly resist dropping in the occasional causerie, sodality, or antiphonal?

While I host a show in the same time slot and tradition as Carson, I am, per certo, not Johnny. Per Tynan, neither was “Johnny,” who is described as an “eighth” of Carson—the rest being hidden behind Midwestern and professional rectitudes and a protective sodality (there we go) of producers, lawyers, and execs who pronounced Johnny a reformed drinker, loving son, and husband faithful to the point of celibacy. (This last, from Swifty Lazar, is by Tynan unchallenged with the logical counterpoint of pointing out Johnny’s wife count.)

True or false, what care we? Johnny or “Johnny,” he was there every night like the tide, and we loved him. I have the Carson books; I have watched the Carson bios; I have a dear friendship with his old writer and peer Dick Cavett. Nothing in Tynan’s article surprised me, but I enjoyed it as a time capsule—or, given the submerged iceberg at its center, a cryogenic chamber.