MSNBC is reporting that Johnny Carson, host of The Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992, died today of emphesyma at the age of 79.

Johnny Carson was a class act all the way. The end of his stint on The Tonight Show was, in many ways, the end of the great era of television. Johnny presided over seven U.S. presidents (and, thankfully for comedy, he said, seven vice presidents), the change from black and white to color, and a moon landing.

Johnny Carson was funny in a way that I have never since seen a comedian be funny. You can't say that he wasn't raunchy, because he really was, though he wasn't explicit about it. There were subtle innuendoes in many of his jokes ("A woman came up to me after the show yesterday and said, 'I want to capture you on canvas.' I said, 'You want to paint my portrait?' She said, 'No, I've got an army cot in my Winnebago'"). He artfully mixed visual humor with puns and slapstick to create a hilarious show. One of my favorite sketches from his show features Hamlet as a sales pitchman ("To sleep, to die, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub. Mentheladum deep heating rub. There's no beating deep heating," "And as we pause, let me ask you, are you suffering the slings and arrows of painful hemmoroidal itching?"). Another great sketch is Johnny's take on Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" routine, but with Ronald Reagan and Jim Baker. I won't repeat it here because it has to be watched, and no amount of artful typing can convey the effect of watching the sketch.

The banter between himself and Ed MacMahon is unrivaled in the history of television. Johnny made Ed crack up so many times on camera that it's hard to count. Johnny was a master of improvisation, taking a funny situation and running with it (Johnny, as his character Aunt Blabby, got annoyed with Ed's repetition of what he had just said: "Why do you repeat everything I say? I can go to Taco Bell for that!"). Especially funny was their banter whenever Ed was a little bit tipsy, which happened a lot throughout the 1970s.

As Michael Ventre's euology at MSNBC observes, "The day that television died was May 22, 1992. The day it was buried was today."