Is Late Night Dead - 1. Late Night with David Letterman - The Anti Talk Show

0:03 A week before The Late Show went off the air for good, David Letterman stood on the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater with a pile of CBS property next to him. Dave was 79, retired, he had the beard, and he'd come back to the building that he'd moved into in 1993. The pile had guest chairs from the set, The desk chair, a bunch of watermelons, and a three-tier cake somebody had baked to celebrate the show's run. Down on the Broadway sidewalk, there was a giant CBS eye filled with ball pit balls. Dave and Stephen Colbert started throwing things off the roof, and Dave explained that they were up there for the wanton destruction of CBS property.

0:48 Dave said he'd expected the day to be sad, but this brought true joy to his heart. Then he signed off with Edward R. Murrow's quote,' Good night and good luck.' Plus one more word that got bleeped. Now, if you're of a certain age, you know that that was never a late show bit. Dave came up with it at NBC in the 80s at 1230 late night with David Letterman. Dave would push things off a five story tower and watch them explode on the pavement. And the reason he did it was because it was funny to watch a watermelon explode. So the last thing Dave ever did for CBS was a bit he'd invented at 1230 when network television assumed nobody was watching. Hi, I'm Johnny Mac from Daily Comedy News, and this podcast asks the question, is Late Night dead? Over the next episodes, I'm going to try to answer that question, and I'm going to do it through the lens of my North Star at Late Night, David Letterman. Not 1130, not Johnny, 1230 with David Letterman.

1:40 He will be my North Star for this series. What got me into 1230, Dave, was everything that it wasn't. The intro was low-key, nothing like Ed McMahon doing Here's Johnny and a band and applause. Dave came out in khakis and sneakers, looking like a guy who'd wandered onto the set from the mailroom. The energy in those early episodes was so low, it felt like Dave was surprised the show was on, too. MUSIC From. New York, where special effects have just about replaced normal human behavior, it's Late Night with David Letterman. Tonight, Steve Martin, actress Brooke Shields, and Stupid Pet Tricks. Also, another installment of Dave's Grab Bag. And now, a man who knows only too well that science can be used for both good and evil, David Letterman!

2:51 Johnny Carson's Tonight Show was an event. Late night, felt like you'd snuck into somebody's office after hours and found the funniest guy in the building messing around with the equipment. On top of that, there was a guy living underneath the seats. One of these days, you're going to wake up on the roller coaster in Chris Elliott land. And I'm going to be running the brake lever. But until that day, I'll be right. Here, making your life a living hell. Watching you, watching everything you do. 1230 David Letterman was the story of how a weatherman from Indianapolis built the show that's really a story about rules, and the man who wrote the rules was Johnny Carson. We'll start in Indiana. Dave was doing quote-unquote Letterman before anybody paid him to.

3:31 At Ball State, Dave worked at the 10-watt campus radio station and got fired for treating classical music with a little too much disrespect. After he graduated in 1969, David Letterman went to work at Channel 13 in Indianapolis as an anchor and weatherman, and it was clear right away that the weather was not the point. He once congratulated a tropical storm on being upgraded to a hurricane. He predicted hailstones the size of canned hams. He gave forecasts for cities that didn't exist. Once the satellite map came up without the border between Indiana and Ohio, Dave told viewers it had been erased by some kind of dirty political deal and the two states were now one. That was the whole sensibility already there on a local newscast in the early 70s. In 1975, Dave packed everything up and drove to Los Angeles, as he pronounced it on the show. He went to the comedy store, did stand-up, and ended up in a room writing jokes for Jimmy Walker, you know, J.J. from Good Times, superstar back in the day.

4:22 Other writers in the room included a guy you may have heard of, Jay Leno. Remember that name? It's going to come up in this podcast a few times. Dave was a cast member on Mary Tyler Moore's variety show Mary, which didn't last very long on CBS. And in May of 1978, David Letterman sat on Tom Snyder's couch on NBC's Tomorrow Show next to Billy Crystal and a comedy writer named Meryl Marko. Later that year, David Letterman did The Tonight Show and Johnny Carson liked him. That was the only review in comedy that really mattered in those days. Johnny kept booking him and then let David Letterman guest host The Tonight Show. By 1980, he was one of the regular people sitting in for Johnny. NBC decided that Dave needed his own show, so NBC put him on in the morning. The David Letterman Show premiered June 23, 1980, and ran for 90 minutes in the daytime.

5:11 It's the David Letterman Show live with Edwin Newman of the NBC News, Frank Owens of the David Letterman Symphony Orchestra, plus David's guests, Marjorie and Morton Chavis, to discuss making it as a two-paycheck family. Edwin Newman on the political debates, a tour of New York City street vendors, letters from viewers, and a visit to Willard Scott's house. And now a man who would rather do it himself, David Letterman! Merrill was the head writer. By now, she was Dave's girlfriend. And everything that would later make Late Night great was already there, just on at the wrong time of day. Stupid Pet Tricks started on that show. So did Small Town News. Dave opened every episode with an intro that made no sense. Critics loved it. And the audience at home who wanted card sharks had no idea what was going on. By August, NBC cut it down to an hour.

5:59 Not a good sign. And on October 24th, 1980, four months after it started, The David Letterman Show was canceled. The canceled show went on to win daytime Emmys, which is a funny thing for a show almost nobody watched. NBC reportedly paid Dave around a million dollars to not work anywhere else for a year. Generally speaking, networks won't pay a guy to sit at home unless they're afraid someone else will figure him out. NBC knew what they had. They didn't know what to do with him. The answer turned out to be Tom Snyder's chair. The Tomorrow Show had been on NBC after Carson since 1973. In 1980, Johnny had renegotiated his deal and cut The Tonight Show from 90 minutes to an hour. That left a hole, so NBC moved Tomorrow up to 1230 and stretched that show to 90 minutes. They also decided The Tomorrow Show needed more entertainment, and they brought in gossip reporter Rona Barrett as co-host and renamed the show Tomorrow Coast to Coast.

6:50 Snyder hated the whole thing. Barrett quit in June of 81, saying she wouldn't play second fiddle to Tom Snyder or anybody else any longer. The last new episode of Tomorrow aired on December 17, 1981. Chevy Chase was the final guest. Johnny's contract with NBC gave him control of the hour after The Tonight Show. Carson's own company, Carson Productions, co-produced Late Night with David Letterman. Carson didn't want more of The Tonight Show following his Tonight Show, so the new show came with a list of things Dave wasn't allowed to do. He couldn't have a sidekick like Ed. His band couldn't have horns because Doc Severinsen had horns. He couldn't book old school showbiz guests because that's what Johnny did. So you can't have on Jimmy Stewart and Buddy Hackett and that's OK. No stump the band, no Karnak. He even had to keep the topical jokes in his monologue to a minimum because that was Johnny's territory. If you watch a lot of those early episodes, it's two jokes and then he heads over to the desk. All the restrictions turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to David Letterman. It was basically a description of what a talk show was. Johnny Carson told Dave, go do something else. No horns meant Paul Schaefer in a four-piece band that sounded like the best bar band in New York City, which at 1230 in the morning is exactly what we wanted to hear. No sidekick meant Dave was alone out there, so he talked to the crew, the stage manager, director Hal Gurney, some Paul Schaefer in the mix. And because you couldn't book the big-time stars, you got people like Pee Wee Herman, Sandra Bernhardt, Harvey Pekar.

8:12 Late Night with David Letterman premiered Monday, February 1st, 1982, Studio 6A at 30 Rock. If you go and watch that first show, it'll tell you what the show's going to be. The first person on screen is not David Letterman. It's not an announcer. It's Larry Bud Millman, played by Calvert DeForest, delivering a warning to the audience in the style of an old Frankenstein prologue that what was about to happen might be too shocking for some viewers. Good evening. Certain NBC executives feel it would be a little unkind to present this show without just a word of friendly warning. We are about to unfold a show featuring David Letterman, a man of science who sought to create a show after his own image without reckoning upon God.

9:06 It's one of the strangest tales ever told. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So if any of you feel that you don't care, To subject your nerves to such a strain, now's your chance to... Well, we've warned you. The first guest was Bill Murray. He came out mad, at least pretended to be mad. He threw jabs and accusations at David Letterman as if he had a grudge. Everybody in on it knew it was a put-on, while half the audience at home wasn't sure. Dave showed footage of a panda from a Chinese zoo, said it was a home movie of his adopted pet. He pulled a crew member on stage, had him do jumping jacks. The second guest was Don Herbert, TV's Mr. Wizard. If you were an NBC executive watching at home, you probably were wondering what you had paid for. The numbers were good, though.

9:57 About a million and a half people watched the premiere. That was up about 30% from what Tomorrow had been getting. Their views were split. Daily Times wrote that much of Letterman's first week did not gel. The AP called it a welcome liberation from conventional talk shows and called Dave a sensational ad-libber. A polished late night would have been a smaller Tonight Show. An unpolished late night was something nobody had seen. Or had they? We'll get to that in a couple episodes. Chris Elliott was 21 when the show started. He was a production assistant whose job included wrangling the animals for stupid pet tricks. By the middle of 1983, Chris Elliott was on the writing staff and showing up on camera. By the mid-80s, he was the show's secret weapon. He'd create a character, run it for a few weeks, a few months, and then retire it.

10:40 There was Conspiracy Guy, Panicky Guy, and The Fugitive Guy, a parody of The Fugitive. I'd like to take a couple of seconds here to introduce a new member of our crew. This is our new camera operator. He's with us for the first time tonight. Folks, say hello to Roger Campbell. Roger, nice to meet you. Well, thanks very much, Dave. And I just want to say that the other camera boys have really made me feel. Right at home. So I think maybe I'll stick around here for a while. Oh, great. We'd love to have you. Now, where did you work before you came to NBC? Oh, you know, here, there. Yeah. And then what shows did you work on? I did a lot of medieval festivals, traveling carnivals, that sort of thing. But like I say, the other boys have made me. Feel right at home. So maybe I'll stick around here.

11:21 I didn't realize they televised those traveling carnivals and festivals and stuff. They televised some of them. You know, Roger, there's something there's something very familiar about you. Dave, I'd love to stand around here all day and gab with you, but it's my first day on the job and I don't want to screw anything up. Oh, no, I understand perfectly. Perhaps after the show, we'll get together, have dinner and maybe a steam or something. I'd like that. OK, great. And then there was Guy Under the Seats, a creepy little man who lived under the audience bleachers, crawling out in the middle of the show and threatening Dave to make his life a living hell. Chris Elliott was on the writing staffs that won Emmys four years in a row from 84 through 87. The Bits could make a whole episode on their own. If you're of a certain age, remember the time Dave put on a suit of Velcro and threw himself at a Velcro wall and he stuck?

12:06 Remember when he put on Alka-Seltzer tablets and got lowered into a tank of water? Then he did the same thing with a suit of Rice Krispies and a giant bowl of milk. They crushed things in a hydraulic press and they dropped things off the five-story tower. They strapped a camera to a chimpanzee and called it the monkey cam. I was in the audience for one of those. One night, the picture slowly rotated a full 360 degrees over the course of an hour, so if you tuned in halfway through, the show was upside down. One night, the staff said they were too tired to come downstairs, so they did the show in the production offices. Every one of those bits was aimed at the talk show format itself. The most famous bit started as a dig at a magazine. On September 18th, 1985, David Letterman held up a list from Good Housekeeping and pointed out that top ten lists were everywhere. He said that because they were such solid network television programming material that Late Night was going to start their own. The first one was top ten words that almost rhyme with peas. Number one was meats. Top ten ran for 30 years and went with Dave to CBS.

13:04 What made 1230 feel dangerous was that anything could happen. It could even happen to Dave. On July 28, 1982, Andy Kaufman came on with the wrestler Jerry Lawler to talk about their feud. Lawler slapped Kaufman out of his chair. Kaufman came back swearing and threw coffee, and nobody at home knew if it was real. You could only get that at 1230. Carson would have never booked it. Cher came on and called Dave a name I'm not going to repeat. Some celebrities said they were afraid to do the show, and that fear was why some people watched. Then there's the bit that tells you who Dave was. In 1986, General Electric bought RCA, which meant GE, now owned NBC, which meant GE was now David Letterman's boss. So Dave took a camera crew to the GE offices to welcome the new owners. He brought a fruit basket and a security guard wouldn't let him in. Dave said, you need authorization to drop off a fruit basket? Oh, this is going to be fun to work with these people, isn't it? Now, Carson made fun of NBC in the monologue, but Dave went to the new boss's front door with a camera and made them look ridiculous on their own air.

14:01 Late Night builds a cult following, particularly among college students. Hi there. Those were the people awake at 1230 and they were raised on TV, so they knew how it was supposed to go and loved somebody taking it apart. Watching Dave, you felt like you were in on the joke with him, and the joke was on anybody who took it seriously. Before Late Night, the host's job was to make the guest comfortable and the audience happy. Dave's job was to find out what was funny about the fact that he was hosting a talk show at all. By 1991, it was no longer a cult show. It was making NBC somewhere between $ 20 and $ 30 million a year. It was nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Series year after year. That year, it won a Peabody. That citation said the show had taken one of TV's most conventional and least inventive formats and infused it with freshness and imagination. It compared the show to Your Show of Shows, Ernie Kovacs, and The Steve Allen Show. And we're going to come back to Steve Allen because a lot of what Dave did at 1230 had a grandfather. So it's 1991.

14:55 Dave has spent nine years at 1230. He's super influential. He's the guy every young comic wants to be. By most accounts, Johnny Carson thinks Dave is the rightful heir to The Tonight Show. And then on May 23rd, 1991, at an event for NBC advertisers, Johnny Carson announced he'd be leaving The Tonight Show the following year after his 30th season. The next Tonight Show host was going to be the most important job in comedy, and the guy at 1230 was sure that it was his. I think you know where this is heading. I'm Johnny Mac, and thanks for staying up late.