Johnny Carson

Johnny Carson's Straight Man for 30 Years, Dies in L.A. Hospital Ed McMahon, perhaps the most famous sidekick in television history, has died at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 86. For 30 years, he sat cheerfully on the couch next to Johnny Carson on the set of NBC's "Tonight Show," and it was his trademark phrase that opened the broadcast every evening: "H-e-e-e-e-e-ere's Johnny!"

His publicist, Howard Bragman, did not give a cause of death, saying only that McMahon had a "multitude of health problems the last few months." He had been hospitalized in February, reportedly with bone cancer, and had also suffered a broken neck in a fall in 2007. He died early Tuesday morning at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, surrounded by his family, said Bragman.

"It takes a lot more time to not be nice than to be nice," McMahon once said. Audiences will remember him laughing at Carson's jokes, moving aside on the set to make room for the show's featured guests, and smiling through commercial pitches. McMahon and Carson had worked together for nearly five years on the game show “Who Do You Trust?” when Carson took over NBC’s late-night show from Jack Paar in October 1962. McMahon played second banana on “Tonight” until Carson retired in 1992.

Ed McMahon

Ed McMahon, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles, will be remembered mostly as the man who sat next to Johnny Carson, except when more important celebrities came between them. Notwithstanding the dozen years of hosting "Star Search," a role in the 1997 Tom Arnold sitcom "The Tom Show," a high-profile Cash4Gold ad during the last Super Bowl and all that knocking on people's doors in the name of the Publishers Clearing House.

It's easy to underestimate his accomplishment -- or even to wonder whether it should be called an accomplishment at all. We live in a nation of aspiring quarterbacks, pitchers, lead singers and presidents, where we are told to dream big and have it all. (The vice presidency of the United States is regarded as a rarefied form of failure.) But in a world where everyone is innately a star, what does it mean to settle for life as a mere moon?

And yet, just as the moon plays upon the Earth, animating its tides and its werewolves, the sidekick is not without power of his (or her) own. His very presence is the proof that his presence is required. He may come as a straight man, a stooge, a teacher, an apprentice, a servant or pal, but he completes the star-hero in some way to their mutual advantage -- as a counterweight, an anchor, a witness, a frame for the picture, a setting for the stone.