Why David Letterman Is The Most Important Late Night TV Host Of All Time
If you've only been watching Letterman since the late nineties, then you probably don't understand why people are freaking out about his resignation.
By the late ninties, Letterman was mostly just another late night host, running through his jokes, interviewing celebrities.
But, before that, in the early eighties, he was one of the most innovative, hilarious people on television. His influence extended beyond his show and inspired a number of comics and talk show hosts.
"David Letterman is the best that there is and ever was," tweeted Jimmy Kimmel after hearing about Letterman's retirement. He retweeted someone's response to his sentiment, "Dave Letterman would tell you Johnny was the best, but he'd be wrong. Dave changed late night."
Letterman broke into public consciousness not with "The Late Show" - the CBS show he hosts today - but with "Late Night with David Letterman," which aired after "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson" from 1982 to 1993.
The writers and producers reveled in creating a completely absurd, silly show that was poles apart from the more conventional class and humor of "The Tonight Show."
Wikipedia provides these highlights of the show's surreal happenings:
- One early episode showed everything from Dave's eye view with [writer Merrill] Markoe and others coming at Dave to pitch ideas as he walked onto the stage, and the audience was shown from Dave's view during the monologue and the opening segments.
- In another show, the picture turned like a clock, eventually being seen upside down half way through.
- There were segments where Letterman was dressed in a suit of Velcro and stuck to a Velcro wall, a suit of chips and dunked into a vat of chip dip, a suit of Rice Krispies and doused with gallons of milk while lying in a huge bowl, a suit of Alka Seltzer tablets and dunked in water, etc.
- Visual segments showing things being crushed by a hydraulic press, thrown through fluorescent lights or dropped off an office building to smash on the ground, were also common.
- Letterman's desk featured a control panel where he could operate a bubble machine, "radioactive" steam, a belch of New York soot or strange lighting.
- When he threw his pencils through the fake window scene behind him, a sound effect of breaking glass was always heard. Occasionally, if sound effects technician Howard Vinitisky was slow in triggering the appropriate breaking glass sound effect, Letterman would mockingly chide Vinitisky for the error. (He would also congratulate Vinitisky when the sound effect was especially well-timed.)
- A robotic arm for a while delivered the Top Ten List, and for another week or so, a complicated series of tubes would produce swirling coffee to eventually land in his cup on the desk.
- Cameras mounted on a chimpanzee's back (Late Night Monkey Cam) or on the roof (Roof Cam) would show odd viewpoints of the set and its participants.
When Letterman moved from the 12:30 time slot to the 11:30 time slot at CBS, he dialed back the weirdness, but was still successful. He was still funny, but not as crazy.
Hopefully, in his final year he cranks up the subversive, weird stuff that made David Letterman David Letterman.
To give you a sense of the friendly (but in-your-face) weirdness the show thrived on, here's Chris Elliott appearing as "The Guy Under The Seats."