When Dick Cavett was a TV talk-show host, he almost never sat behind a desk, which made it very difficult for him to hide his penis. The nation stared at the shame of his sex as it flopped about. Still, the show went on.

In Cavett’s New York Times blog and in culture critic Ken Tucker’s long, new Grantland article about the current late-night shuffling and scuffling, each man names the same host as his favorite in the ever-more-crowded yet ever-less-influential world of late-night television: Stephen Colbert. (His reign will continue until Donald Trump gets a talk show. He’s the best at everything.) An excerpt:

From Cavett: “And speaking of Dave’s presumably stepping aside some sad day, if CBS is smart, there is in full view a self-evident successor to The Big L. of Indiana.

The man I’m thinking of has pulled off a miraculous, sustained feat, against all predictions — descendants of those same wise heads who foresaw a truncated run for the Carson boy — of making a smashing success while conducting his show for years with a dual personality. And I don’t mean Rush Limbaugh (success without personality).

I can testify, as can anyone who’s met him and seen him as himself, how much more there is to Stephen Colbert than the genius job he does in his ‘role’ on The Colbert Report. Everything about him — as himself — qualifies him for that chair at the Ed Sullivan Theater that Letterman has so deftly and expertly warmed for so long. Colbert is, among other virtues, endowed with a first-rate mind, a great ad-lib wit, skilled comic movement and gesture, fine education, seemingly unlimited knowledge of affairs and events and, from delightful occasional evidence, those things called The Liberal Arts — I’ll bet you he could name the author of Peregrine Pickle. And on top of that largess of qualities (and I hope he won’t take me the wrong way here), good looks.

Should such a day come, don’t blow it, CBS.”

From Tucker: “Stephen Colbert is, for me, working on a whole different level from anyone else, and is currently the most consistent, deeply satisfying late-night host. Colbert’s ability to joke and conduct interviews on The Colbert Report while inhabiting a persona antithetical to what is probably a profoundly decent person beneath that smirk ‘n’ makeup is the most sustained piece of performance art ever. I’m not saying he’s greater than Letterman was (and still can be) at his best, but that they both inhabit roles (for Dave, the ironic rube; for Stephen, the cheerfully evil asshole) as utterly as Daniel Day-Lewis.”