Deconstructing Dave
The first time I watched David Letterman was summer vacation of 1982. My initial impression was, “Who is this gap-toothed weasel and what did he do with Tom Snyder?” I was not a normal 13-year-old.
By the end of the week, Dave was my new favorite way to stay up too late, excepting of course for pacing back and forth in front of my brand-new phone, trying to work up the nerve to call a girl. Any girl.
Letterman came on after Johnny Carson — who I started watching seven or eight years earlier, any time I could manage it — but was nothing like him. Carson was the master — urbane, smartly-dressed. Los Angeles via Iowa.
Dave was… not those things.
Letterman was awkward — crude, wore sneakers and sweaters. New York via Indiana.
Carson’s guests were people my grandparents knew and watched. Dave had on any and everybody — from stars barely older than I was, to the world’s (then) oldest usher. Carson put on a black wig and did a passable Reagan. Letterman barely acknowledged politics existed. Carson did skits featuring chesty spokesmodels. Dave climbed up to the top of a five-story tower and dropped off two water balloons filled with guacamole.
Carson inspired me. Dave cracked me up. Carson was who I wanted to be. Dave was who I wanted to watch.
I stopped watching Dave a few years back. Not for any particular reason — I’d just kind of outgrown watching latenight TV. If anything, Dave was probably knocked off by my DVD library. Hardly his fault.
But everything I’ve read about him the last couple years makes me glad he hasn’t been a visitor to my living room of late. This item seals the deal:
Mr. Obama’s visit, to be followed on Tuesday night by another guest of note, former President Bill Clinton, happens to dovetail with a larger strategy for “The Late Show With David Letterman.” The comedian has been reshaping his program around a longer, more ambitious, more politically pointed monologue — the kind viewers associate more with that long-running late-night show on NBC.
“When he began in television, Letterman was virtually apolitical,” said Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse. “Now he’s moved to the point where he could be called a political comedian.”
Letterman’s genius was what one writer at Liberty magazine called “post-ironic humor.” Essentially, Letterman found humor in the badness of television itself. The unspoken premise of his old Late Night show on NBC, and again at CBS, was, “If you think TV is bad, wait’ll you see the crap we get away with.”
And in his heyday, that was a premise that worked.
Dave hyped dweeby Paul Schaffer‘s little group as “the world’s most dangerous band.” He read little lists of ten not-quite-funny items with pomp and seriousness. He gave the best lines on his show to his crewmembers, and to strange anti-stars like the fictional Larry “Bud” Melman. He got serious laughs out of lame-ass catchphrases like, “They pelted us with rocks and garbage.”
It worked because Dave was poking fun at the conventions and cliches of television — and at himself for playing along with them, albeit subversively. The joke was, he was in on the joke.
Irony is when your actions result in the opposite of your intentions. Post-irony is when you go ahead and take the stupid action — with perfect knowledge beforehand of what the screwed-up result will be. Dave was the post-ironic master of making great bad television, on purpose, five nights a week. Letterman was television’s funniest screw-up, goofing his way to the top.
That was his shtick. And, man, it did work.
But politics and Dave mix like Carson and Arsenio. These days, Letterman is an institution. After 30 years of television, his subversions are the conventions. But instead of continually seeking to subvert and undermine, now he’s aiming lower — at his audience. Instead of taking us for a joyride through the often-idiotic world of TV, he’s telling us we’re the idiots, because we’re not all New York hipsters with properly conventional politics. Letterman, it seems, has finally forgotten his Indiana roots.
Well, maybe I am dumb, but I can tell the difference between good-bad TV and bad-bad TV. And Dave’s TV is just bad.
I quit watching Letterman a long time ago, when he spent an entire week making fun of a gas station owner with the unfortunate name of Dick Assman. Once was funny. Twice, not as funny but still funny. An entire week? Give it a rest.
People still watch Letterman? Who knew?
At one time I thought he was funny. Then he started going downhill. Stopped watching him.
Letterman had two high points: his stellar acting in Cabin Boy and his genius hosting of the Oscars.
Everything else is not too good.
I thought I was the only one who still remembered (and quoted) “they pelted us with rocks & garbage”.
He was once hip, now just a grumpy old fart who thinks he’s hip. He’s still making Bush jokes for God’s sake. Why not jump in with a few Ike jokes while he’s at it.
Faster than a rolling O. Stronger than silent E. Able to leap capital T in a single bound. It’s a word. It’s a plan. It’s Letterman.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22electric+company%22+%22letterman%22
Oh wait, wrong Letterman…
I was not a normal 13-year-old.
Word.
Sibling!
Wow… is this the definition of our tiny generational slice or what? When I was a teenager Letterman was exactly what you said. His humor felt like it came sideways and you were smart for getting it, for seeing the funny.
Now he’s just an unfunny person much older than me.
Fogy!
An elderly junior high school punk.
Letterman followed in Steve Allen’s footsteps…
Stupid stuff, done just to be stupid, with quick wit and a cast of helpers to pull it off. Now he seems to me to have Bill Maher’s problem-
He’s not quite as brilliant as he imagines.
We need a new Steve Allen.
Amen.
Dave shaped my humor and thus, my life, but our paths have definitely parted. I still watch him every other week or so, just to see if really has gone off the deep end. And I guess I’m always hoping I’ll find that old spark is still there.
Well, there’s a touch of a spark. IMO, Dave doesn’t completely suck, and he is ALMOST still worth watching. But that damn sanctimonious political preaching just ruins it.
He’s become a sell out. A political sellout, but a sellout none the less. Much like a Bruce Springsteen or a Neil Young. They can all still rock when they want too. But they’re not rocking for me.
And they’re not singing for Bud, as Neil Young once put it. They’re singing for Dem.
So while I think they are all still good in their own ways, I refuse to sit through 20 minutes of political bullshit for 5 minutes of creative stimulation.
Grew up watching Carson. Often stayed up to Dave. Really preferred Dave to Leno but stopped watching him a few years ago and started tuning into Leno
Now I’ll watch Conan, then switch to Ferguson.
I like the political jokes unless they are condescending or mean spirited. Dave has completely lost his sense of irony. Now he’s just pissy.
“We need a new Steve Allen.”
Oh is that ever true!
You admit you don’t watch the show – how can you write an article about it?
Billy –
I’d say this article shows I’ve watched more Letterman, appreciated more Letterman, and fundamentally understood more Letterman than 99% of the general public. So unless you’d like to point out something I got wrong, I suggest you slink away and stop embarrassing yourself.
I’m not sure if I grew old and finally understood what DL was saying on his show, or if Dave grew old and became a bitter old man. Too much negative in the world. I don’t care for it.
Dave lost me with his food tricks. I find wasting food a real turnoff.
Now Steve Allen… what a great comedian and musician.
Brother Theodore. Dave will always get points in my book for introducing the nation to Brother Theodore.
Steve Allen had Brother Theodore on pretty frequently — long before Letterman ever had a show. Letterman was just about the last one to catch on to Brother Theodore, long after Johnny Carson as well. But then so many of both their most often used routines originated with Steve Allen, didn’t they.
David Letterman is just secretly bitter that even though he’s far wealthier and far better known, he’s still just the lesser Garrison Keillor. I think that’s the actual source of the whininess in his voice.
Letterman’s sell-by date came and went long ago. As someone noted previously: such a bitter, bitter man.
Old Letterman catchphrase: “They pelted us with rocks and garbage”
New Letterman catchphrase: “You kids get of my lawn.”
Runner up: “And you bring back my Obama yard sign or I’m calling the cops!!”
So will Dave warm up the crowd with a few jokes about rapes of Zero’s daughters by various members of the New York Yankees? Boy, I bet that would get a big laugh!
The irony is, as liberal as NBC’s management has gotten today, they probably find Letterman’s humor far more in line with their tastes than the guy they picked over him 18 years ago, Jay Leno (especially since Letterman’s monologues nowadays are basically the 11:35 p.m. Eastern equivalent of “Countdown”, with a band, audience and better furniture).
But as the years have gone on, the decision made in 1991-92 to go with Leno has paid off in the ratings, in large part because, while Jay is also a liberal, he’s been smart enough not to show his disdain for potentially 50 percent of his viewing audience, which has become even more apparent over the past few months. Dave’s all but declared his opening segment an “Obama Comedy-Free Zone”, where only the mildest jabs are allowed due to ideology. Nobody in the history of late-night shows has ever gone that far before — you do material on the guys who are in the news and making mistakes, and even if it’s a president who’s from your favorite political party, so be it.
Nobody’s expecting hard-hitting questions from a talk show hose, but Monday’s show with Letterman interviewing Obama probably has a better than 50-50 chance that the president will end up coming off as far less hostile to his opponents than Dave does in his questions.
His schtick consisted of cold-calling earnest Midwesterners and mocking their earnest lives, and they usually owned him because he hadn’t done his homework. You’d expect that from a Broadway sophisticate like Kitty Carlisle, but people like her never did it. You don’t have to take it from a weatherman from Indianapolis. He’s a rube, and a lame one at that. Always has been.
Letterman lost it alright. Some say he lost something when he went to CBS. Maybe.
But what really messed the guy up and killed the laughter was 9/11. Dave was hit hard. Suddenly post-irony didn’t seem adequate or to make sense of things, but that was all he had.
Dave suddenly felt his age. He had lost the ability to be fresh or innovate.
Instead of expanding the funny in new directions, he started to actually pay attention to his world, and no longer had the ability to filter the tragedy of it all through any sense of humor (dried up).
Most of the first year or so after that he spent his time looking shellshocked.
Then, as he started actually mixing in more actual political observation and seeing the world he had made a living obliviously abstracting and sneering at, he was unequipped to contextualize it.
He obviously started reading (seriously) at that time, the Times and other magazines his friends and neighbors seemed to be learning from.
He seems to have taken it all at face value, as gospel, without a grain of salt.
He is now the equivalent of an indignant teenager whose first ideals have been skewered and is tasting cynicism for the first time.
Except, he’s what, 70?
I suppose, if I cared enough I would say it is time to bring Crispin Glover back on to kick those stupid uptown specs off his face, and maybe some sense into his head.
But I find it impossible to get mad at his impotent venom mix of arrogance and ignorance, because he just makes me feel sorry for him. And a pitiful clown with a broken funnybone and broken heart is the saddest thing in the world late at night.
One lesson we can learn from Letterman is that if you don’t spend a minimal amount of time thinking, you can become dependent upon others in a pathetic, sycophantic way. Letterman would regularly employ the affectation of a dumb guy, with the winking subtext that he was really a pretty sophisticated person, but it’s funny to pretend to be dumb.
But then when he got older and decided he wanted to prove his chops, he started snarling the most utterly conventional hatred-tinged left-wing crap, in order to mirror and thereby suck up to his left-wing guests & audiences. So the joke was really on Letterman. He actually was just a dumb guy all along.
He got really annoying when he started getting into that “I’m more NYC than the people who were born here and never left” attitude. It’s one thing to make fun of it, it’s another thing to believe it about yourself.
I wonder if there is any way to calculate how much free advertising the Dems have gotten from “entertainment” show like this over the decades. Probably a staggering amount. Then they have the nerve to complain about “wealthy Republicans” having an edge!
As far as Dave goes, I used to idolize him and watched his show every night in the 1980s. I think he started becoming a left wing mouthpiece around 1988 when he started trashing Dan Quayle every night. Yet as I recall it wasn’t like he tried getting Dukakis elected. He still was almost apolitical otherwise. Then he seemed to become more enamored of the Clintons when they came in.
He ceased to be cutting edge in the mid 1990s, for sure. After that I stopped watching. The show was just not funny anymore, and the old style of the NBC show was gone. I sure miss the old Dave. Now that real comedy is ignored in favor of BHO worship, you couldn’t pay me to watch him.
The first time I watched David Letterman was summer vacation of 1982.
Hence the problem – nothing says stale like 27 years of schlock.
…Letterman peaked about 20 years ago– and has been ‘phoning-in’ the show for the last 10 years.
The monologue, Top-10 & skits are lame, and he wastes huge amounts of air time at his desk– simply babbling. A-List guests are the only thing of substance.
He should retire, quickly. He’s a very wealthy recluse who clearly has lost interest in his show. Perhaps he soldiers on from loyalty to his TV staff & crew — who would likely be unemployed if he quit.
Sad.
Throwing stuff off a five story building wasn’t exactly funny, but it was fun.
The fun is gone though. I watched him in college and after, when I had a job that started two in the afternoon and got home at midnight so I could smoke a joint and watch Letterman.
But now I have a 9 – 5 job (actually 7:30 – 4:30) and quit certain things. Dave has stayed where he was and is just spiraling inwards. There’s nothing new there.
I’m afraid the days of the giant door knob are long over. Too bad.
Larry Bud Melman was at my sister’s wedding so I have a picture of him putting a garter on my leg. He was a very sweet man. (My brush with greatness.) That, of course, was back when the show was fun. Now, Dave says the only person who makes sense to him is Al Franken. I think that tells you all you need to know.
The giant doorknob: You don’t understand, folks! It’s just plain big!
Anyway, I remember on one early NBC show when Elayne Boosler went off on a rant about women’s rights. There was nothing particularly wrong about anything she said, it just completely devoid of laughs. Dave let her go on for a bit, then cut in and said something like “You do know this is an entertainment show, don’t you?”
Now, years later, Dave’s making alleged jokes about Palin having a slutty stewardess look. Well, Dave, there’s no joke there. I think you forgot that it’s still supposed to be an entertainment show.
His jump to CBS ended it for me. On NBC, he was at the bottom, pointing up at the mountain and getting his little jabs in, letting his audience in on the joke. At CBS, they gave him his own mountain, and now he looks down on us all, with none of us in on his joke…
He’s been phoning it in for at least 15 years. It was true the last time I saw him back in the early 90′s.
This – not politics – is what really bugs me about the guy. He is extraordinarily lazy. His whole shtick is to go out with the attitude – “We haven’t bothered to write any jokes. We aren’t even trying to be funny. We’re simply sitting around wasting your time, but aren’t you sophisticated for watching.”
(I do have to say I can’t entirely dislike the guy though because he was a big Warren Zevon fan. At least he has good taste in music.)
If Dave want’s to be Bill Maher, that’s his call. To be Maher though means to have a Maher sized audience. That may not make his bosses at CBS too happy.
Late in the game, I know, but y’all are wrong about Letterman and Allen. The key is remembering that Letterman is an Indiana boy.
Why? Because Letterman based his schtick on Paul Dixon, long a household name in the Cincinnati/tri-state area. I used to sometimes watch the Paul Dixon Show as a kid myself.
If you follow those two links, you’ll find references to Dixon schticks which should sound awfully familiar…
Dave’s never been the same since leaving NBC. His worst show there was better than his best show on CBS.
I may be wrong but I believe that when Dave transitioned from NBC to CBS, he lost his writers and some of his comedy routine, including Larry Budd Melman. He had to start over again and this time to compete with Leno in the late night “prime time” slot which means having to appeal to a larger audience. No more of the quirky stuff he did at NBC which was funnier and far more original. I think the same thing is happening to Conan now that he has moved to Leno’s time. Don’t think he can get away with the stuff he did in his original show. But, I agree, Dave is well past his prime and his show is not worth watching anymore.
Chris, that’s my recollection–NBC fought to strip him of every bit of intellectual property they could. “Late Night” gone, “The World’s Most Dangerous Band” gone, Larry Bud Melman, gone. And so on. But I think Dave’s biggest problem was that he underestimated his audience. Who says he couldn’t have successfully brought his schtick to an earlier time slot? I don’t think he tried, he just went vanilla.
Watched Letterman every night for years. Gave up during the last election. He became more and more politial, which was bad enough, but it also seemed mean. Mean people suck.
Dave was able to keep most of the same people, and announcer Bill Wendell followed him to CBS (before getting canned a few years later) along with stage manager Biff Henderson. But CBS wanted a brassier show than what Late Night had been, which was where the problem was. The louder, flashier, style may have been CBS’s idea of what worked at 11:35 Eastern, but it basically had been what Letterman had been making fun of for the previous 11 years (the only time Dave’s show did the full gloss was the prime-time anniversary shows NBC ran, and the hype and overblown production compared to “Late Night” was just more fodder to ridicule).
Letterman made fun of the CBS suits on his new show, but unlike on NBC, where he was working in the same building as those suits, you never felt there was anything subversive about this — it was more Dave being naughty because that was the routine. The rest of the show over the years has become a parody of what it was parodying, and his actions in not trying to play his political humor down the middle (Letterman tore into James Carvelle back in 1999 when he tried to excuse the Lewinsky scandal during an appearance) means when Obama appears tonight, the people tuning in will more than likely be the ones already on Dave and Barack’s side; the ones Obama needs to get his plan passed tuned out a long time ago.
Just do not get Letterman’s shtick at all anymore. Same with Conan. Neither one of them is the least bit funny to me. I just stopped watching late night shows now. why bother.
Stephen, you deserve some good TV: WANT! Click on full screen and fasten your seatbelt, pal.
Remember back when Dave was funny?
Remember back when Dave had hair?
Coincidence? I think not…
Great article, and so very true. Reminds me of Howard Stern, someone I grew up listening to … and still do.
The old Howard would devour today’s Howard, a phony, preening personality who is the antithesis of his former persona.
Oh, and he gets every Friday off and takes more vacation weeks off than everyone except Santa Claus.
Howard’s politics were always moronic – often the dumbest conservative and liberal talking points all mashed together. Today, they’re worse … limousine liberal rants with the occasional hard right blather.
My favorites were always the velcro suit — I wanted one like bad! — and stupid human tricks. How sad that those wonderful bits are gone forever, to be replaced by moronic nastiness. I’ll stick with the fun and sexy proud new American Colin Ferguson, thank you very much, with sneak peeks at Leno’s newspaper clippings.
DL may have been funny in the past but he is now nothing more than a vicious little man, someone that attacks defenseless children, poor NYC merchants and Mid-western Farmers. I stopped watching this jerk many, many years ago.
Letterman lost it years ago. In the beginning that smirk was for himself and was shared with the people who should have known better than to be watching. It was fun, inside stuff.
Later he just started smirking at people. Too often sincere, decent people just trying to earn a living and having done nothing to deserve mockery.
A smirk is not always a good punchline. At least not if it’s all you’ve got.
My first impression seeing Letterman was much the same as Mr. Vodka’s: “Who is this gap-toothed weasel?” Then I quit watching him and it doesn’t sound like I’ve missed much.
Linked today…
Great stuff, VP
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http://reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com/2009/09/full-metal-jacket-weekend-wrap-around.html
What is getting lost in this discussion is the difference between 11:30 and 12:30. The fact is that being on the second hour of late night TV afforded more freedom and subversion. Look at Conan’s show. Now that he is on Tonight, you can expect him to tone it down. That sucks.
Dave toned it down to compete with Leno and gather larger ratings. But I miss the old Late Night. Fond memories of that show. I used to tape Carson and Letterman. I’d listen to Johnny’s monologue and fast forward to watch all of Late Night. Dave had the one joke monologue, but that joke always killed.