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Letterman jokes about al Qaeda in first show since threat

David Letterman isn’t holding his tongue on tonight’s “Late Show.”

In his first show back since a jihadist online called for the CBS funnyman’s tongue to be cut out after he cracked jokes at al Qaeda’s expense, Letterman quickly begins making fun of the situation.

“We have a great audience night in and night out but tonight you mean a lot to me,” he said in a clip CBS released before the show airs tonight. “You people are more than an audience tonight, really. You’re more like a human shield.”

Letterman then says he came out late because he was backstage with someone going over the CBS life insurance policy to see if it cover jihad.

Then he recounts the threat and says, “I wish I had a nickel for every time a guy has threatened to cut [out my tongue].”

What follows is a list of people who hate Letterman, including al Qaeda, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, the “Late Show” crew, NBC, CBS, the home audience, his neighbors and Tony Danza.

Security at the Ed Sullivan Theater in Midtown was beefed up for the “Late Show” host’s return today, a source close to CBS told The Post last week.

Letterman had angered an overseas terrorist operative with a June 8 joke about the drone strike that killed Osama bin Laden’s one-eyed successor, Ilyas Kashmiri.

“We pray to Allah to paralyze his tongue and that the righteous believers will break his neck,” a man calling himself Umar al-Basrawi, or Omar from Basra, Iraq, wrote Tuesday on the online jihadi forum Shumoukh al-Islam.

US Muslims were called upon to cut off Letterman’s tongue and “break his neck” in a chilling post by a suspected terror operative on the al Qaeda online forum Shumoukh al-Islam. The late-night funnyman angered a crazy jihadist bearing the moniker Umar al-Basrawi, “Omar from Basra, Iraq,” because he joked about the deaths of Osama bin Laden and his successor.

In the missive, al-Basrawi said Letterman, a Presbyterian, is Jewish and part of a “Zionist” conspiracy.

“I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears one of the scum of the Jews, one of their pigs, mocking the leaders of the mujahedeen,” al-Basrawi wrote Tuesday, according to translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a nonprofit that monitors online chatter.

“We pray to Allah to paralyze his tongue, and that the righteous believers will break his neck,” the threat continued.

On his June 8 show, Letterman had said. “So [al Qaeda] picked a successor to Osama bin Laden, and his name was Ilyas Kashmiri. Well, guess what: He was blown up by an American drone.

“It wasn’t going to work anyway, because they got off to a rocky start with this guy,” Letterman continued. “He botched up the story of Paul Revere.”

The quip referred to when Sarah Palin bungled an explanation of Revere’s role in the Revolutionary War.