Aside from the occasional sporting event, it’s very rare that I watch live television anymore. Hulu often makes me wait a week for many shows, but that’s well worth the convenience of watching them whenever I want. Meanwhile, Netflix makes me wait the better part of a year and charges me $4/month (I split it with a friend), but that’s well worth never having to watch any goddamn commercials.
Plus, you know, the joys of binge watching a series. It’s like going face down into a bowl of chocolate pudding and nearly suffocating in the most wonderful way imaginable.
But last night I fired up the flatscreen and fiddled with the rabbit ears to catch David Letterman‘s grand finale. And I’m glad I did. Despite the commercials.
The truth is, I haven’t watched Letterman, or any other late night television, in quite few years. If I’m watching anything at that hour instead of sleeping, reading a book, or enjoying a drink with a friend, it’s the aforementioned streaming services.
It’s not that I thought Letterman stopped being funny. He didn’t. I mean, he’s no longer groundbreakingly funny; that’s not something you can really maintain. But I think he’s still generally quite funny. So it wasn’t that.
In fact, it wasn’t a conscious decision of any sort. In retrospect, it was combination of things. I can’t take the commercials. There are other things I’d rather be doing at that hour. And the late night talk show format in general had worn thin for me; I guess I can no longer pretend that the halting prattle of uninteresting celebrities plugging their uninteresting projects makes for anything approximating entertaining conversation.
A decade? Could it be that long since I really watched Letterman? I don’t know. Maybe.
Yet I made sure to catch his final show last night. Part of it was just my sentimental side wanting to revel in the heartfelt goodbyes. Beyond that, however, Letterman’s departure has been a major cultural event rivaling Johnny Carson‘s 1992 retirement.
Some of that comes from simple longevity. No one’s done it longer. Letterman spent 33 years hitting his mark for the opening monologue, pointing to Paul Shaffer, and then talking into the fake mic on his desk. You stick around long enough, and people usually take a liking to you.
But there’s more to it than that, which becomes very clear when you remember that Letterman was never actually the undisputed king of late night ratings. He spent his first decade waiting in the wee-hour wings behind the grand emperor, Johnny Carson. Afterwards, he was mostly shunted into second place by the usurper,
Jay Leno, and now the crown prince, Jimmy Fallon. More recently, he failed to attract younger fans in sufficient numbers. But despite what many saw as a royal screwing by NBC, then the jump to CBS, an increasingly grandfatherly persona, and nearly perpetual also-ran status in the ratings, Letterman firmly established himself as a premier element of Americana in ways that rivaled Carson (who had no real competition) and far surpassed anything Leno could ever dream of.
Seriously. Did anyone really give a shit when Jay Leno stepped down from The Tonight Show? Either time?
Aside from his longevity, Letterman ensconced himself in American popular culture with his sense of humor, which truly did break new ground in the late night format back in the 1980s. He brought a healthy dose of irony and absurdity to what had been, under Carson’s reign, comedy by the numbers to a certain extent. That’s not to say Carson wasn’t funny. He was. But Johnny Carson was also the type of person who would occasionally turn to sidekick Ed McMahon and say, without any irony whatsoever:
There’s only really five jokes, right? There’s the one about the paper cheese in the trap that catches a paper mouse. What are the other ones?
I only watched the last of Carson’s three decades on The Tonight Show, but I heard him earnestly wrestle with that list more than once. As if it’s real. As if there are actually only five types of joke.
And then at 12:30, on would come David Letterman, who was very, very different. He eschewed the formalism. In fact, he seemed to enjoy mocking it. The alka-seltzer suit. The vel-cro suit. Stupid pet tricks. Stupid human tricks. The surreal bits with Chris Elliot and Larry Bud Melman. Will it float? Throwing things off the top of a building. Odd gifts to the audience, like random cuts of meat.
All of it was self-consciously ridiculous, a sly departure from the culture of the World War II generation, with their rules and categories and firm ideas about what was right and what was wrong and how you had to go about things.
A devastating war will do that to a culture. Make it rigid and moralistic. The same thing happened to American culture after the Civil War with the rise of the Victorians. A major war creates a sense of purpose and sacrifice, which in turn calls for categories and rules. It took half-a century after the Civil War before the Roaring ’20s finally popped uptight Victorian culture.
In the early 1980s, David Letterman helped pop the post-WWII rules and categories, and doing so forever marked him as an important piece of American popular culture.
But perhaps what most firmly established Letterman as a pop culture icon was Letterman himself. The man. The person. And in this, he actually had much in common with Carson.
Both Carson and Letterman were from the Midwest. And I don’t mean Chicago. Carson grew up in Iowa and Nebraska. Letterman hails from Indiana. And they were both sincere, polite, and modest in that decidedly Midwestern manner. Both exuded a profound sense of genuiness.
Letterman, no matter how ironic or prickly he could be in the name of comedy, always circled back to his core. He’s the kid who worked as a grocery store stock boy. He’s the teenager who attended Ball Sate because his grades weren’t good enough to get him into Indiana University. He was as quick-witted as anyone, but he wasn’t a fast-talker. He was soon as famous as anyone who came on his program, but always seemed far more down to earth than nearly all of them. And he never seemed to forget how lucky he was, how charmed his life.
You never doubted who David Letterman was. He was the opposite of slick. His natural goofiness was accentuated by the space between his two front teeth and his mismanaged tuft of hair. He was the guy who always looked tremendously uncomfortable in the suits he had to wear to work.
All of that endeared him to millions of loyal fans and made him central to the culture in a way that none of his rivals were (or are), despite their superior ratings. And it allowed him to connect with those fans in ways both comedic and serious.
When, after 9/11, Letterman went on the air, dispensed with the guests and the jokes, and just talked to America for an hour, you could feel the genuine pain and despair, the yearning for hope and courage, the need for catharsis. You knew he was doing this because it was the only thing he could do. It’s what he had to do. That was him right there, it’s who he was.
When the other late night hosts aired similar shows in the nights that followed, it felt like they were doing it because Letterman had done it, and they knew they’d look bad if they didn’t follow his lead. But other than Jon Stewart, they had nothing to offer. They were in over their heads.
When Letterman went back to being funny, they did too.
But Letterman’s sense of humor was never for everyone, another factor that kept him almost perpetually mired in second place. Despite that, however, or maybe because of it, his fans were loyal and his place in American culture secure.
During the turn of the 21st century, many of Jay Leno’s fans didn’t seem to understand Letterman’s quirky sense of humor, and they mostly ignored him. Many of Letterman’s fans, however, seemed to resent that Leno was more popular, mocked Leno’s sense of humor as unsophisticated, formulaic, and pandering, a derided him as being too show bizzy, an accusation that Letterman was entirely immune to.
So I tuned in last night because I am a sentimental sort at times. And I am a Letterman loyalist. And I do like his sense of humor.
And even though I haven’t bothered watching Letterman in quite some time, I still wanted to catch the farewell glimpse of a comic legend who first took to the late night airwaves when this here middle aged man was only 14 years old, sneaking peaks with the volume turned down low on the old Zenith. And I’m glad I did, feeling a little sad knowing he’s no longer there for me to turn to as we all move on to the next thing.
