In 1980, a comedy ice age was ending. The lumbering mastodons were dying out, the tundra was cracking open and perfect little daisies of coolness were popping up.
On NBC, there was this wild, anarchic morning show like nothing my friends and I had ever seen. Summers were notorious televised wastelands then. There was absolutely nothing for us kids all summer long except excruciating, unwatchable soap operas. Nobody had a VCR yet. There was nothing to watch. It was an emergency. We were all forced to exit our houses and go grumbling into the sunshine and swimming pools.
“The David Letterman Show” changed all that. It was completely bizarre. It wasn’t like all those boring, sincere, simpering self-improvement programs aimed at our moms (like “Today”). This was comedy anarchy. The show seemed to be mocking the idea of doing a show in the first place. Like “Caddyshack,” which came out a few weeks later, it tore into boring, irony-challenged authority figures.
Naturally, “The David Letterman Show” flopped, and was canceled right after summer. But then it came back, in revised form, at the other end of the day: “Late Night With David Letterman” debuted in 1982. Fittingly, Dave’s first guest was Bill Murray. The two of them had the exact same sensibility — my sensibility, my friends’ sensibility, maybe our whole generation’s sensibility.
Our sacred mandate was always to be profane — irreverent, sardonic, cynical, dismissive and lightly destructive. We’d never believe in anything. The mantra was improvised by Murray on the set of “Meatballs,” a movie that was showing on HBO around the time Letterman’s morning show was dying: “It just doesn’t matter.” Whatever happened, you’d never lose your cool.
If you happened to be goofing around with a basketball and it somehow wound up in the street, you’d just roll with it, yell out the window, “Hey! Toss that up here!” And if the ball came back at you twice as fast and crashed right through another window, you’d just go, “Thank you!”
On the morning show and “Late Night,” Letterman pioneered something completely new and intoxicating: Anti-comedy that was funnier than the real thing. Comedy that would hide in the weeds, sneak up and kill, like the Viet Cong. He’d decided (as Murray ruled, in “Stripes”), “We’re mutants. There’s something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us.”
Letterman was the antidote to the lame, showbizzy, let-me-entertain-you style of comedy I associated with Las Vegas, tuxedos and “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.”
I couldn’t believe it when I heard Letterman worshipped Johnny. Johnny was this smug, self-adoring relic who’d have on Don Rickles or Phyllis Diller or Jerry Lewis to mug desperately, pull faces, shout — anything but be funny. They were pathetic comedy salesmen who wouldn’t leave your doorstep until they’d unloaded their wares.
Half the time, Johnny wouldn’t even be on Johnny’s show. There’d be long stretches of guest-hosting — John Davidson! Joe Garagiola! — while Johnny went off to loaf. The only guest host who didn’t immediately make you want to turn off the TV was . . . Letterman.
In high school, Letterman wasn’t one of the cool kids. He was one of the kids standing off to the side, mercilessly mocking the cool kids. Which was so much cooler than actual “cool” (the high school simulacrum thereof).
Letterman’s guests were anti-guests. They weren’t headliners from Saturday night at the Sands. They seemed like random weirdos culled from the underbelly of the city. Who were his talent bookers? C.H.U.D.? One such anti-guest, Larry “Bud” Melman (actually Calvert DeForest), was so hilariously inept, it wasn’t clear whether you were laughing at or with him.
Letterman’s bits were anti-bits. He held a contest to decide what American’s hot new catchphrase would be. The winner was, “They pelted us with rocks and garbage.”
Instead of sucking up to celebrities, Letterman did things like dropping stuff off buildings. Backing up cars over iron teeth labeled, “DO NOT BACK UP.” Letterman didn’t seem to want celebrities, or like them. Once, in 1991, when an interviewee was being amazingly boring, Letterman said something like, “This is one of those nights when I just pray for a slow gas leak.”
When Letterman got a new job at CBS in 1993, it was even better. Now he was on at 11:30 p.m. instead of 12:30 a.m. I’d miss fewer shows, plus my new job (I started at The Post the day after he launched “Late Show”) meant I didn’t have to get up until noon. I saw practically every episode, for years.
But, somewhere around the turn of the century, I lost interest. The show became less and less surreal. Real celebrities started showing up, and I winced as Dave would suck up to them. Suddenly, everyone had a perfectly polished, self-deprecating anecdote — invariably meant to prove the utter fiction that Celebrities Are Just Like Us — that sounded suspiciously crafted by a team of writers. Suddenly, each episode had as many as three celebrities, with Letterman being unctuous and insufferable and fake-laughing his way through every minute.
At times Dave would turn depressingly earnest, particularly when he thought he had a Deep Political Point to make. He had George W. Bush on during the 2000 campaign and started grilling him about capital punishment. It was crushingly wrong for Dave to turn into a finger-wagger, especially since he seemed woefully out of his depth on any issue. His comedy started to sound like everybody else’s, with the same potshots at the same easy targets. His act sounded less like dada, more like Dad.
Letterman was the barking dog who caught the car, was invited in, and curled up delightedly on the seat. He was the outsider who joined the very club on whose doorstep he used to leave a flaming sack of dog poop. He was the cool guy who became Mr. Big-Time Showbiz Personality. Letterman shouldn’t retire. He should just continue doing his shtick. In Vegas.