Reply #33: I was 17 when he retired, so..... [View All]

What I remember about Carson was that his voice, when I was really young, was soothing and his demeanor was relaxed yet uproarious. Like another poster has said, watching his monologue in the scary Reagan years was like getting "tucked in."

As a sullen teenager, I often skipped Carson, because his reliance on guest hosts was getting annoying and Letterman's show was genuinely a dangerous piece of TV; on Dave's program, you never really knew what would happen, whereas Carson's appeal was that you ALWAYS knew what would happen...the former appealed to me more as a young'un (and still does,) but now that I'm a little older, I can see why the latter is just as valuable.