David Letterman: Love him. Hate him. He was better in the ’80s. Regardless of what you think of him, there is no denying that the man, millions of people affectionately call Dave, has been a staple on American television for three decades. I think that alone is enough to cement his place in television history and that he can safely be considered a legend.
Now that Dave is retiring, everyone is doing their own retrospective. CBS aired David Letterman: A Life on Television, which showed all the big moments and focused mainly on his years at CBS. On the internet, Television critic Tom Shales wrote an article for The Daily Beast, while Conan O’Brien, Letterman’s successor on Late Night, noted in Entertainment Weekly how that television changed when a man by the name of David Letterman walked onto the set of his eponymous NBC morning show. Yes, someone at NBC thought putting a future late night legend on at 11 a.m. in the morning was a good idea. The results were rather odd, but the show gave the world two Letterman staples: Stupid Human Tricks and Stupid Pet Tricks thanks to writer and Dave’s former girlfriend, Merrill Markoe.
Despite the wealth of goodwill CBS and the internet are showering on Letterman, most people fail to point out that if Late Night with David Letterman existed in a world where the Internet was already mainstream, he surely would have gone viral. The show was completely irreverent. Letterman would throw random things off a five-story tower because he could. There was also the suit of magnets and the suit of chips, which saw Dave lowered in to a vat of dip.
When Letterman wasn’t being goofy and random for the sake of being goofy and random, he would purposely dig into his bosses at GE. No one else could turn trying to deliver a fruit basket to your new bosses and being kicked out of the building into six minutes of comedy gold and introduce the “GE handshake.”
The last thing about Dave’s years on Late Night that everyone has left out is that Jay Leno was a frequent guest. While nowadays, the first late night war is irrelevant and has become a minor footnote, we did not always live in a world where Letterman and Leno fans agreed to disagree on what they found funny. It was a special occasion when Jay stopped by with a TV guide and Dave asked him, “What’s your beef?.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVnjJJFFhMA
Once Letterman moved over to CBS, he grew up. Gone were those tennis shoes that he wore with his suits and ties. He gradually morphed into the elder statesman of late night television. His show continued to be wacky, but it was no longer random and concept shows like the 360 degree and the rerun episodes disappeared when Dave and the gang left NBC. The Top Ten lists slowly became more and more based in reality, even though it would have been nice to see more lists like the one that started it all: “Top Ten Words That Almost Rhyme with Peas.”
While Letterman’s Late Night was known for its atmosphere and openly showing disdain for the celebrities and Hollywood act it was a part of, The Late Show became defined through its newsworthy moments. This probably had to do with the fact that NBC would have claimed the name “David Letterman” as intellectual property if the idea wasn’t insane, which prevented Worldwide Pants from taking their NBC show over to CBS lock, stock, and barrel. Over the years, Dave has also admitted that 12:30 is a young man’s game and that 11:30 requires a different approach.
In the early years, The Late Show created memorable moments in a similar vein to those of its predecessor. Larry “Bud” Melman was now using his real name, Calvert DeForest, but Letterman was still able to convince him to do wacky things. One of the first Late Show’s had Dave taking a job at McDonalds, where he asked customers to stop at the supermarket and bring him a bag of onions or a sack of potatoes, because the “CBS deal didn’t work out.”
However, it was The Late Show that gave the world the moments that everyone, outside hardcore Letterman fans, remembers. No one is ever going to forget a foul-mouthed Madonna making Dave uncomfortable or the time Drew Barrymore dance on Dave’s desk and flashed him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtyxIfwoEns
Then, there was the time disgraced former Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich appeared on the show and proceeded to embarrass himself in 2008 just because he was part of the then-current zeitgeist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blz87f9gSes
Also, no one knows why Richard Simmons, Dr. Phil, Bill O’Reilly, or Regis Philbin agreed to appear on The Late Show all those times, when it rarely ended well for any of them. At least, Oprah finally decided to show up and end a feud that never existed.
In the end, no amount of writing about David Letterman is going to change the fact that he isn’t going to be on our TVs for much longer. We aren’t going to have the yearly holiday tradition of Jay Thomas telling his Lone Ranger story and hitting a meatball on top of a replica of the Empire State Building that is on top of a Christmas tree this year or any of those to come. We also aren’t going to be able to pretend that the nightly ritual of watching late night television before tucking yourself into bed still exists because someone Johnny Carson made relevant kept that classic American image on life support for the last 10 years. Late night television has changed for better or for worse. Ironically, YouTube, which had a hand in fracturing the late night audience into a million pieces, is the main way David Letterman’s legacy will be kept alive.
David Letterman signs off from Late Night with David Letterman tonight on CBS
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Allison Lips is the Founder of Wait! What’s a Dial?, a television blog that showcases the writing of millennials. Allison graduated from Rowan University in May 2013. She has a passion for TV history, especially late night and game shows. If she could go back in time, Steve Allen would still be hosting The Tonight Show. Follow her on Twitter @waitwaitsadial.
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