By Barry Dutter
When I was in high school, I was obsessed with David Letterman. Well, I was obsessed with TV in general, but Letterman was special. His show was on late at night, way past my bedtime, but those early years of LATE NIGHT were so funny, so innovative, so unforgettable, that they got me to stay up later than I ever had before. (I mean, I’d never made it past the first half the TONIGHT SHOW before!)
Oh, and one other thing -- they changed talk shows forever.
As a teenager, my friends and I used to take the bus to New York City to attend tapings of LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN. Tickets were fairly easy to come by in those days. I would send in a request to the ticket department at NBC, and a few weeks later, a pair of tickets would arrive in the mail.
Sometimes I would write multiple letters, in the hopes of getting two pair of tickets for the same day, so I could bring three friends.
We were seniors in high school, just the right age to welcome a new breed of comedy to late night television. When Dave announced his retirement recently, my friends and I started reminiscing about some of our favorite Letterman moments. All of the moments were from the first few years of LATE NIGHT, when Dave was at his bitter best.
Among the highlights we recalled: the Late Night After School Special, “They Took My Show Away.“ Any appearance by Chris Elliott, but especially his stints as “The Panicky Guy,” “The Guy Under the Seats,” and “The Terminator Guy.” Any appearance by Larry “Bud” Melman. The time when Dave covered himself in suit of Alka -Selter and lowered himself into a giant tank of water. The time Andy Kaufman came on and got in a fake fight with a wrestler. All the times when Dave dropped stuff off the roof. Viewer Mail. Staying up to watch Letterman “live” meant struggling to get up for school the next morning, but it was a sacrifice I gladly made. (Sure, I could’ve set the VCR and taped it for viewing after school the next day, but then I wouldn’t be able to talk about the show in homeroom the next morning!)
I first became aware of Dave when he was a young stand-up comic. I know he was on a short-lived Mary Tyler Moore Comedy Variety Hour in the late 1970s, but I can’t think of a worse fit for him as a performer.
And when it was announced in 1980 that Letterman would be getting his own morning show, just around the time my summer vacation was starting, I made sure to check it out., At 90 minutes, the show was too long, and honestly, not that funny. I remember there were far too many cooking segments. Morning was not a good fit for Dave.
It’s a testament to NBC that they still believed in Dave, despite the failure of his morning show. They knew that a Letterman show could be successful. They just had to find the right time slot.
It only took 2 years for NBC to announce that Dave would be getting a new show, airing at 12:30 am, after THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JOHNNY CARSON. Dave’s new show would be called LATE NIGHT, and I can honestly say it changed my life.Dave was not your typical friendly talk show host., He was cranky and irritable. When he was in a bad mood, he made sure everyone knew it. And if he did not like or respect or agree with a guest, he made sure everyone knew that, too.
I’ve tried my hand at stand up many times, and I’ve often found that with my nervous energy, I tend to talk too fast. Whenever I think of a role model who knows how to slow down and deliver a joke, and really let it breathe, I think of Dave.
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| Actual letters mailed to me by NBC! |
I remember how hard it was staying up past midnight to watch Letterman’s show. Some of the earliest uses of my family’s VCR were to record LATE NIGHT.
But it was so much better to watch it the night it was on -- so you could talk about it at school the next day, and be part of the water cooler buzz.
I thought it would be fun to attend a taping of an episode, so I wrote in for tickets. When that first pair of tickets arrived in the mail, I was hoping we would get to see some big stars. Instead, the guests that day were Regis Philbin and some recurring whack job named Brother Theodore.
But the guests were almost irrelevant. For me, the biggest thrill was getting to see Dave live and in person, doing his thing. Letterman was famous for being the only TV host to do his own “warm-up” This meant that he came out before the show and chatted with the audience for a few minutes. TV shows traditionally hire a relatively unknown comic or announcer to do that.
Before the taping of each show, Dave would ask if anyone in the audience had any questions. This gave me the chance to do something I could never do with Johnny Carson or Jay Leno or any other talk show host: I had the chance to actually talk to Dave. He would always start out by asking what my name was and where I was from. I would always try to prepare a good question or a funny comment beforehand.
One time I told a funny joke to Dave that got a good reaction from the crowd. A few minutes later, the show started. Dave came out and did his monologue, and repeated my joke from earlier. Then he explained to the folks at home that the joke had been given to him by “a nice young man from Scotch Plains, NJ.”
I loved having that shout-out on national television. In a sense, I had just written a joke for my favorite late night host. I didn’t get paid for it and they didn’t mention me by name, but I knew that the joke was mine, and I made sure all my friends and family knew it, too.
From 1982 to 1985, I must have attended the tapings of 25 or 30 Letterman shows in New York with my friends. I sent in dozens of requests for tickets, maybe even hundreds. I didn’t want NBC to think that it was one guy writing in all those requests, so I started using fake names with my home address. 
I got very creative with the names. I wanted to see if there was any name that the NBC ticket department wouldn’t send tickets to. Over the years, I received envelope addressed to Pablo Pequeno (AKA Paul Small), Lady LaVentanilla (AKA Lady The Ticket Window); Guy Manlike; Guido “The Killer” Scarpelli, and my personal favorite, John “yeah” Bravo. (it was supposed to be Johnny Bravo, but NBC really messed up the spelling on that one!)
As time went on, and the show became more popular, the Late Show became harder and harder to get tickets to. What had once been a twice-weekly thing became once a month or less. The waiting time started getting longer and longer.
( In comparison, the waiting time for tickets to Saturday Night Live, another NBC show that taped in the same building, could be a year or more. In three years of trying, the best I could manage to get was tickets to one SNL dress rehearsal.)
Eventually, the novelty kind of wore off and we stopped going to see Letterman live. Truth is, watching the show live is really not that different from seeing it on TV. And after Late Night had been on for a few years, it no longer seemed as fresh and funny as it had in the beginning.
His humor, which had relied completely on Dave’s clever wit and odd turn of a phrase, slowly degenerated into him making faces and shamelessly mugging for the camera. He still got laughs, but it seemed to me he was now going for easy laughs. He was no longer working as hard to earn them.
In 1993, Letterman left NBC and the hallowed halls of 30 Rock for a new gig, hosting the Late Show over at CBS. I was curious about what the new set-up as like, but by this time, writing in for tickets was no longer a priority.
In 1996, I moved to South Florida, which you would think would mark the end of me seeing Letterman live.
Except for one completely random publicity stunt that brought me face to face with Dave one last time -- though I almost wish it hadn’t! In 1997, the Late Show announced plans to fly in audiences from different cities to attend tapings of the show. One of the cities they announced as part of this grand experiment: Miami!
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| Sitting in the audience at THE LATE SHOW! |
A few weeks later, I found out that I had won a pair of tickets. But who to bring with me? I ended up inviting Jessie, a cute bartender girl I had just met a few weeks before. Jessie was a lot younger than me. She was only 22 to my 36, and she had never seen David Letterman on TV before.
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| Flying, Miami-style! |
Jessie had never been to New York before, so it was fun seeing the big city through the eyes of a newbie. The first day, we were free to do whatever we wanted. Jessie had a short bucket list of things to do in New York, which included riding a subway, eating a hot dog, and seeing Central Park.
In one afternoon, we checked off everything on her list.
The next day, we got down to the main event: attending a live taping of THE LATE SHOW. The premise of the episode was that Dave would pretend that he had moved the show to Miami for one day. The set had been redecorated to make it look like we were in South Florida, and everyone in the audience was from the Miami area. (Apparently it was cheaper to fly 100 people up from Miami than it was to move an entire TV production down south for one day.)
It was around 3PM that Jessie and I, along with the other 98 or so Miamians, were led into the studio and directed to our seats. Of courser, I was jazzed about the chance to talk to Dave before the show. I even had a good question for him. I planned on saying, “Hi Dave. This is my friend, Jessie. It’s her first time in New York City. Do you have any advice for her?”This is what’s known in the comedy world as, “Feeding the comic a straight line.” I figured the quick-thinking Dave would have some fun with that one, and maybe even get some material he could use on the show.
At least, that was the question I planned to ask. Shortly after we arrived, Dave came out and chatted up the audience. He asked if anyone had any questions. This was my big moment. My hand shot up -- and I guess I must have been a little nervous or distracted, because instead of asking the question I had intended to ask, it came out very differently.
“Hi Dave. This is my friend, Jessie,” I began. “She’s never seen your show before, and I was wondering if you have any advice for her.”
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| I used to own this shirt! |
Dave was stunned. Here it was, minutes before showtime, and some jerk (me) was bragging about he and his girlfriend had conned CBS out of a free trip to New York without ever having seen his show before!
Now, let me clarify a few things here. 1) I never said Jessie was my girlfriend, and 2) I never said that I hadn’t seen Dave’s show before. Of course, I’d been a fan for over 15 years. But at that moment I felt like a first-class heel.
Dave was flabbergasted. He started poking fun at us in the few minutes left of his warm-up. We figured it would stop by the time the show began. But we couldn’t have been more wrong.
When the show started, Dave came after is with guns a-blazing. He started the show by telling the home audience how some idiot in the audience had bragged about never seeing his show before. Dave did his impression of me, basically doing his “dumb guy” voice, saying, “Hey man,. I’ve never seen your show before, but we got you suckers to fly us to New York, man!”
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| Jessie tries her first NY hot dog! |
An exasperated Dave wouldn’t let up. He turned to his producer off-camera and explained the while idea of flying in an audience from another city. “They’re supposed to have seen the show before!” he fumed.
I was afraid Dave might kick us out of the theater, but he knew it was better to keep us trapped there for the whole show. The audience laughed at all of Dave’s jokes. I dare say, it was a funnier show because of Dave’s constant attacks on us. At one point, when guest George Hamilton referred to an unruly customer at his restaurant in Miami, Dave nodded toward me and said, “I think that guy is here tonight!”
A couple of times when Dave referred to Jessie and I, they would turn up the house lights and cut to a shot of us. We got way more attention than anyone else in the audience, though I swear that was never my intention.
Jessie took the whole thing in good stride, but she confided to me in private, “If they show us on TV one more time, I’m going to cry!”
Dave is at his best when he is angry, and he was on fire that night. He wouldn’t let up. He referred back to us every chance he got. The most unforgettable line of the night was when Dave looked at me and said, “I don’t see Jay Leno flying your ass anywhere!”
Finally the hour ended (it seemed much longer for Jessie and I) and afterward, the other audience-members came over and gave us either high-fives, or their sympathy, or a combination of both.
It might be argued that my little faux pas with Dave before the show made for a better episode of THE LATE SHOW. It could be said that the episode was much funnier because I inadvertently pissed Dave off.
That was the last time I ever saw Letterman live. I haven’t really watched his show much since then, not because of anything Dave did that night, but more because I’d just grown tired of conventional talk shows over the years.
And yes, since he moved to the 11:30 slot on CBS, Letterman’s show had become much more conventional than it was during the unpredictable NBC years.
These days, if I’m going to watch any late night show, I will go for John Stewart, who sometimes mugs as shamelessly as Dave does, but somehow with Stewart, it just seems fresher and funnier.
Even though I kind of bailed on Dave Letterman during the final years of his late night career, I was there for the early, essential years, and I will never forget the influence he had on me. Those early years of LATE NIGHT defined Dave as the quintessential talk show host of his generation. (There is a reason why Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmell and Seth Myers and Cona O’Brien list Dave as their biggest influence.)
There was a period from the 80s to the 890s when Letterman was the most unique voice in late night. To borrow one of Dave’s famous phrases, you knew him, you loved, you couldn’t live without him.
But now you will have to. Good night, Dave, and thanks for letting us have more fun than human beings should be allowed to have.
