I always thought Art Carney was the reason The Honeymooners was a great show. Take him away and what you had was a show about a loud-mouthed bus driver who kept lying to people and threatening to smack his wife. You would have hated Ralph Kramden. The reason you didn't was that he had this friend named Ed Norton, and Ed Norton was such a great, lovable guy that you just knew: If he was Ralph's buddy, Ralph couldn't have been that bad a guy. Carney made Norton work and Norton made the series work. He was also funnier than Gleason.
All the obits for Mr. Carney are probably dwelling on his Norton days and perhaps mentioning his fine film work, including the Academy Award for Harry and Tonto. Perhaps in passing, they'll mention that he was the original Felix Unger, playing opposite Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple. Boy, I wish I'd seen that production. I did see Carney years later in another Neil Simon play, The Prisoner of Second Avenue. He was, no surprise, superb in the part and I recall that he got some enormous laughs just from his body language — the way he stood, the way his entire frame reacted to things. Carney was one of the few comic actors of his generation who just moved in amusing ways. He could also, as that play and others proved, break your heart with a single look.
There's a great story about one time Carney got in trouble on live TV. It was a "Honeymooners" sketch on the Gleason show, and Gleason exited a scene and ran off to his dressing room to change clothes — which he should not have done. He forgot that the scene had been rewritten and extended. He was supposed to go back in and engage Art/Ed in more dialogue but he forgot, leaving his sidekick sitting at the Kramden dining table, waiting for Ralph to return and play the rest of the dialogue. When Ralph didn't come, Art realized he had to fill — this is live TV, remember — so he walked over, opened the ice box and found there was nothing in it but an orange. He took it, sat down and did two minutes of orange-peeling. A stage manager finally got Gleason back so the scene could resume but as Jackie himself told the story, those two minutes were the funniest two minutes in the entire hour, maybe the entire season. The kinescope is apparently lost but I'm sure it was wonderful. Because Art Carney didn't know how to be anything less.