The short answer is no, but of course it's quite a bit more complicated than that.

"The Tonight Show" drew an average of 6.5 million viewers a night in the U.S. in 1991, the last year Johnny Carson hosted it, but averaged just 4.1 million in 2013, when Jimmy Fallon took it over. And the U.S. population grew by more than 70 million in the intervening years, meaning that Fallon had a bigger pool of people to draw from but still came up short.

But that's just one show. It gets more complicated when you realize that Fallon had more late-night competition. All the late-night talk shows on the air in 1991 (of which there were just four -- hosted by Carson, David Letterman, Arsenio Hall and Bob Costas) drew 15.5 million in total, while in 2013, 19.4 million people tuned in to late-night shows (of which there were a whopping 13).

It's interesting that all the classic late-night personalities you list in your question hosted various iterations of NBC's "Tonight Show" -- they were never competitors. This tradition of "Tonight Show" succession led to what were called the Late Night Wars in the 1990s -- when Jay Leno was given Carson's "Tonight Show" job instead of David Letterman, who had previously hosted the time-slot after it. When he was passed over, Letterman left NBC and started a show on CBS, and suddenly there was serious competition among late-night talk shows.

There are also more channels now. Back in the early days of late night, there were only three: NBC, CBS and ABC. Now, of course, there are hundreds of channels on TV, many of which produce original programming. Of the 13 shows competing for late-night viewers in 2013, seven aired on channels that didn't even exist in Johnny Carson's day.

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