I suspect that the passing of former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson hasn’t generated much grief in folks my age, and certainly not in those younger than thirty. It’s not that Gen-X has anything against Johnny; it’s just that he was, well, a little before our time. He was an icon for our parents, of course, but for those who didn’t start watching late-night programming until the late ’80s or so, his show always had the slightly stale whiff of a by-gone time about it. I used to think that Johnny’s Tonight Show felt like something Ward might’ve watched after putting Wally and the Beav to bed. It was strictly squaresville, daddy-o. I much preferred the in-your-face, absurdist quality of David Letterman, or even the youthful energy of Johnny’s replacement, Jay Leno. Today, Leno and Letterman have become the old-timers and the kids have got Conan and Jimmy Kimmel and probably others that I’ve never heard of, and they think they’re da bomb, or whatever the current trendyspeak for “cool” is. And you know what? They’re wrong. I was wrong back in the ’80s. The fact is, Johnny was better than all of them. Johnny was the epitome of cool. I was just too damn young and dumb to realize it.

My epiphany on this subject came recently, after I bought The Ultimate Carson Collection for my parents. It’s a compilation of Johnny’s personal favorite moments from the entire lengthy period that he hosted The Tonight Show. I watched it with them just to be polite, and I was frankly amazed at how I reacted. This wasn’t the Tonight Show I remembered. Despite my earlier notions, it wasn’t stale. It was dated, yes, because it was a talk show and so naturally was centered on matters that are no longer topical, but it didn’t feel like I thought it would. It wasn’t painful and it wasn’t square. Instead, the show, and especially Johnny himself, was genuinely funny in a way that damn few things are today. Comedy today tends to be shrill; it’s all based around the put-down, the insult, the been-pushed-too-far meltdown. It’s largely negative. Johnny Carson was positive. He could deliver a zinger with the best of them, but he was never mean. Where Leno comes across as a smug wise-ass, Johnny was gently self-mocking. Where Dave is sarcastic, Johnny was suave. It’s a refreshing difference, even if it is, admittedly, pretty old-fashioned.

There was some truth in my youthful opinion that Johnny’s show was something of a relic. It was unquestionably a product of an earlier time when men changed from gray flannel suits into cozy sweaters and hi-balls after a hard day at the office, and Fred Flintstone hawked Chesterfields in prime-time. But it is this boozey, pre-Watergate, skinny-tie sensibility that makes the show so appealing today. Johnny Carson, the man and his show, was retro-cool, like the Rat Pack without the swagger. He was a consummate comedian who could be naughty without being crass and recover effortlessly from a failed joke by disarming the audience instead of blaming them. And he was a great interviewer as well, able to easily shift his style of questioning to fit the guest, letting them talk as much or as little about themselves as they felt comfortable doing. The awkward moments that occasionally pop up on Leno’s Tonight Show, when you know he’s gone a little too far in his questioning, were rare in Johnny’s day. And the guests were extraordinary, too. While modern talk shows exist almost exclusively as forums for celebrities to hawk their newest product, Carson’s Tonight Show, as often as not, hosted people you’d never heard of, a child with a weird talent or a grandmother from Dubuque who collected interestingly-shaped potato chips. Those segments weren’t precious or trite, they were slice-of-life charming. Johnny didn’t have those people on his show to mock them, as Jay and Dave seem to do with their rare non-celebrity guests. He had them on because he found them interesting, or amusing. Johnny was low-key, sharp-witted, urbane and, paradoxically, one of us. His version of the The Tonight Show was quite simply better television than we have today.

That’s not to say that his show was perfect television. It could be extremely formulaic with its running gags about bandleader Doc Severinson’s loud jackets and second banana Ed McMahon’s drinking habits, or its comedy skits that featured recurring characters like Karnak the Magnificent or the Tea Time Movie host doing essentially the same things we’d seen them do a thousand times before. But there is often comfort in repetition, and these characters and jokes were the talk-show equivalent of nicely worn-in slippers. I didn’t see the appeal of that sort of thing when I was young. I do now. And I miss it.

I miss a lot of things that Johnny Carson represented. That skinny-tie era when television was often live and frequently redolent of cigarette smoke and bourbon was also an era when television was made by and for grown-ups. Watching TV from that era was like staying up late and sneaking into the rumpus room to listen to the arcane, titillating conversations your parents were having with their friends. Far too often these days, watching TV is like listening in on the playground conversations of twelve-year-olds. It’s not that grown-up conversation is any less superficial, but it’s a lot more stimulating. And I miss it.