My Story About David Letterman (WIMTM 7)

There’s been a lot of discussion in the press this week about the final episode of The Late Show with David Letterman. He’s been a regular of late night television for over three decades, and has hosted that particular show since I was in high school. As such, Dave shows up in a lot of my memories from when I was becoming an adult.

Back in the early 1990s I was a teenager with many rituals. I was obsessed with recording to video cassette nearly everything that meant anything to me. And it wasn’t just for my convenience to watch later, as we do nowadays with our DVR’s. I would record things for posterity, and because I loved to watch, and re-watch the same programs multiple times. This was a golden age of television for me. The Simpsons and Seinfeld were in their infant stages, just finding their way. The Disney Afternoon block of syndicated cartoons fed my love of animation, and I was just at the tail-end of dreaming of becoming an animator.

I have dozens of VHS tapes of all these shows, meticulously recorded to edit out commercials, with purposes both frugal (fewer ads meant more content per tape) and archival. But it wasn’t just to record and then put up on a shelf. These tapes served me well for the next many years, a sort-of known quantity for entertainment anytime I needed to relax a bit (don’t forget this was long before we could count on service providers to personalize our content at any point in time). When I was in graduate school, even, I trucked all these tapes down to my dorm room, where my television got no reception whatsoever.

And it was right in this period that David Letterman took to the stage of The Late Show. The late-night wars were making headlines, and I was coming of age. Adolescents gravitate toward entertainment that lets them make adult references, be it Saturday Night Live these last forty years, Adult Swim today, or any number of R-rated movies which, though terrible, prove to the world that you were there. For whatever reason, I wasn’t much into Jay Leno, and my dad and I had, at that point, been recently enjoying re-runs of Letterman’s NBC show or some cable station around 6 or 7 o’clock each night. Knowing that my favorite singer Billy Joel would be the musical guest, I taped that first episode, the one with Bill Murray, Tom Brokaw, Calvert DeForest, and so on. And I was hooked.

For the next five years or so, I barely missed an episode. I could fit a week’s worth of shows onto a single VHS tape. Ever the archivist, when I finally got around to watching, I would be running a second VCR on the side, dubbing a highlight reel, if you will, onto several volumes, sometimes titled “David Letterman Highlights” or “David Letterman Successes”, this second phrase indicating that even I was aware that the show wasn’t all good. Far from it. Even Dave knew that! Later on, I had to set priorities, and my nightly taping of The Late Show fell by the wayside. Some years later, when my wife and I got our first TiVo and were mesmerized by the possibilities of season passes, we began to record the show every night, a trend which has gone on every weeknight for these last thirteen years. She usually found more time to watch than I did, and interestingly enough she was always more interested in the interviews while that adolescent version of me had been in it for the gags, man-on-the-street interviews, 53rd Street antics, Stupid Tricks, and Top Ten Lists.

Back in those earlier days, as attested to in many newspaper articles this week, Letterman was in it much more for the shock value. I’ve seen the word “acerbic” connected to him many times during this re-interest by the media since his retirement announcement. But, in the more recent years, the softer side came out. My wife has saved particular interviews to share with me on more than one occasion. Heartfelt appreciations with injured servicemen and servicewomen; profiles of educators and those who are making a difference. You can throw as many watermelons out the window of a tall building as you want, I would prefer now to remember David Letterman for his more recent self.

Back in 2011, I was spending a day in Manhattan while my wife attended a meeting for work. I had not been in the city since we’d left New Jersey in 2006. I was part-tourist, part-nostalgist, and I still can’t believe the amount of ground I covered that day, mostly on foot. I checked on the rebuilding developments downtown (on a day when President Obama happened to be coming there), visited Lincoln Center, a familiar site for me during grad school, was seen on the Cinco de Mayo episode of Good Morning, America, and made my way around Dave’s neighborhood, among many other things. I was approached outside the Ed Sullivan Theater and asked if I was interested in getting in the pool for tickets that night. “Seriously? Ah, yeah, I’d say I’m interested!” So I texted my wife and told her I had something in mind for that evening, if she were done by 5:00 or so. In a while, the studio called me back and told me I was on the list. It wasn’t a great episode (Jodie Foster, Tom Dreesen, Neon Trees), but what did I care? Although one of, like, 6000, this felt to me like the most important episode he’d ever shot. And he made the audience all feel that way.

We were struck by so much. Seeing beloved on-screen goofballs like Pat Farmer, Tony Mendez, and Biff Henderson actually doing their jobs. That blew me away. I’d always wondered what happens during a commercial break. Now I know. The list goes on and on. It was clockwork. The show started on time, and ended in 60 minutes. Within minutes after that, the stage was dark, the talent was gone, the host a memory. I couldn’t imagine running such a high profile operation everyday, and keeping it so smooth. Amazing memories from that day.

I recently came across one of these stacks of video cassettes in my parents’ attic, and have been on a labor of love this past month converting their contents to my media library. I may or may not revisit these tapes, but at only 5-10 GB per tape, they’re worth far more to me as a digital file than as a spool of magnetic tape. During quality control, I couldn’t help but pop-in to hundreds of brief clips from my “Successes” tapes. And, the off-the-cuff dialog, long since “forgotten”, rolls right off my own tongue like memorized lines for a Shakespearean, performed decades earlier. I realize now how much time I must have spent watching these clips. Turns out, even, that most of “my own” “comedic” bits from that period were pretty well stolen from Dave. Nowadays, I’m confident in saying that, since I’ve largely stopped the life of quoting others, and developed my own unique sensibilities of what is funny, and how to make others laugh with original material. Thank you, Dave, for helping me find my voice!

In keeping with a recurring theme of this website, I make mention of one of the most beautiful recollections I have of this comic legend. A recollection which has nothing to do with those “acerbic” chops of his. Dave has said that he first knew it was time to retire when he was spending time with his kid looking at birds, and forgot who was on the show that night. Connections, community. Whether they be with his oft-mentioned, seldom-seen little boy, or with the unseen heroes whose stories would otherwise not be told, this “kinder, gentler” Letterman understood that. He’ll long be remembered for those occasional touching moments behind the desk, when he spoke to us, privately, from the heart.

Cheers to the future! I hope we’ll be seeing more of you on other CBS programs, as you’ve inferred. But, if you drift off into obscurity, relishing the good life, as your mentor Johnny did, I wouldn’t blame you one bit.