Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show,” in the mid-1990s, starts whipping David Letterman’s “Late Show” in the late-night talk-show ratings — a genuinely depressing moment in the history of American comedy — and up goes a giant billboard in Manhattan’s Times Square, the epicenter of American braggadocio.
It displays a huge photo of Leno, looking cocky, and an even bigger red ” 1″ followed by the continuation of the thought, “In Late Night!”
Letterman’s answer to the gamesmanship: Find a larger billboard near Leno’s and, in the same style but displaying Letterman’s stupidly grinning mug, proclaim: ” 3 in Late Night!” (Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” beats “Late Show” too. Koppel, as best as is known, did not join in the signmaking fun.)
It is impossible to pin down a turning point for Letterman’s CBS hour, the moment it started to find its way again after losing even some of his most devoted and longstanding fans, so we might as well date it to the dueling billboards. Even if most people outside of New York never heard about the July, 1997 contretemps, it makes an amusing anecdote, the timing is more or less right, and it speaks to what is essential about Letterman. The point, when he has been at his best, is not about winning or losing but being funniest.
To say that David Letterman is back is to imply something that wouldn’t really be true. He never went away. But if you were among those for whom he stopped being essential viewing during what we’ll call the mid-decade torpor, it is time to look again (10:35 p.m. weeknights, WBBM-Ch. 2).
You will see not only that he is now wearing his glasses — formerly reserved for bits taped in the office during the afternoons — on the air, but that the host now seems to be most at ease, his show the most efficient comedy machine that it has been since he came to CBS.
It’s not about the recent, second straight Emmy for best comedy, variety or music series, although outside acclaim does help convince people who are shaky in their own judgments. It’s not the improving-ratings story that CBS is pitching, although if you find reward in Letterman’s work, you want other people to find it too. (The show’s ratings, 1.7 million viewers behind “The Tonight Show,” are the closest it has been since the 1996-1997 season, helped along by “The Tonight Show’s” 6 percent decline from last TV season to this one and “Late Show’s” 14 percent growth).
It’s more in the feel of the show, the way it has become, once again, a precise little showcase for Letterman’s nimble mind rather than a bombastic production number. Jay Leno is always adding things to his show in the constant quest for more — every week seems to see another potted plant or neon light on the “Tonight” set — and for a while Letterman was caught up in this comedic arms race too. But now Letterman is paring things down to their essence.
One night, these days, he and Steve Martin will be starring in a pretaped video, “Dave and Steve’s Gay Vacation,” a minor masterpiece of image deflation in which the duo enjoy a giddy fling before settling back into their official hetero celebrity lives.
Another night, Letterman will be grilling — no other word for it — old friend Marv Albert about Albert’s tawdry fall from grace and attempt to resurrect himself, an example of a Letterman who, at age 52, seems newly intent on exploring issues rather than just goofing on them. (He has also surprised New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani with hard questions about the misdeeds of his police force.)
Or he is getting grilled by Julia Roberts about his lack of a social life, in a delightfully bizarre program last May that, with Letterman apparently on pain killers after oral surgery, somehow devolved into him measuring her waist (25 inches) and her measuring his (33).
But through it all there is the sense, once again, of mastery of his domain. Where sometimes he seemed to drift away, especially during interviews, a few years back, Letterman is vitally engaged again.
He comments on his jokes, and the comments — as in this one, made after a bumbled cue-card reading — are often funnier: “It’s not easy being a TV star, ladies and gentlemen. Sometimes you have to read big words.”
Chicago suburban kids show up to demonstrate some gee-whiz science tricks, and he tells them: “You know, if things don’t go your way, just drop out.”
None of this is scripted stuff, and it is in these frequent moments that the magic of what Letterman has been doing for more than 3,000 shows comes out. He doesn’t interview guests so much as poke at them, trying to find something more intriguing than the well-rehearsed anecdotes they were prepared to offer. (“In a very real sense, we book guests to entertain Dave and keep him interested,” says executive producer Rob Burnett.)
Because of that curiosity and skepticism, he is a better interviewer than people give him credit for, but he is best when just goofing around with non-celebs. Playing a purposely half-baked quiz show with two Swedish women in the audience, after asking them about fjords and such, Letterman muses: “I find suddenly I’ve run out of steam on Sweden.”
Then, inspiration: “Do you see Bjorn Borg much?”
Which prompts him to turn to his bandleader, Paul Shaffer: “I’m coming back to life on Sweden, Paul. Second wind.”
Actually, third wind. The first was when the Indiana-bred comic blew across the TV comedy landscape in the 1980s, redefining its possibilities, embodying the irony that had been popularized in the preceding decade by “Saturday Night Live” and the comedy of Steve Martin, Bill Murray and the Monty Python troupe. (It is no accident that Martin and Murray, along with Tom Hanks, have consistently been Letterman’s best guests.)
Irony and skepticism became almost codified in American culture under the influence of 1980s Letterman. For better and worse, it became the angle of approach to most any situation, from watching television to going on a date. There was always another, truer layer to everything, and what you said wasn’t necessarily what you meant.
His “Late Night” — which had the freedom of coming on at 11:30 p.m., after Johnny Carson’s “Tonight” — was about the falseness of talk shows and the whole enterprise in which celebrities deigned to make public appearances only when they wanted something — ticket purchases, book sales — from the public. It was also about the self-indulgence — the belief in the power of a facile and well-trained mind at play — that is the core of most great art.
But through it all there was also an evident respect for the traditions that Letterman was twisting. For all the seeming anarchy in his studio, he saw himself as a “broadcaster,” a man running a talk show under different rules than the king, Johnny Carson, yes, but trying to do it with similar excellence.
The only people in the country who didn’t see this, it seemed, were the ones at NBC in charge of picking the successor to Carson. They let their familiarity with Letterman blind them to his gifts and grew peeved at his unwillingness to kiss up, his insistence that this thing be settled as if life were a meritocracy, according to “The Late Shift,” Bill Carter’s first-rate account of the succession struggle.
After giving Leno the “Tonight” job Letterman had always wanted, then having second thoughts and almost taking it away again to give it to Letterman, they settled on Leno to succeed Carson in 1992.
Letterman left, as soon as he could, for CBS and his second wind. Beginning in August 1993, the show was a national sensation as it exploded out of the Ed Sullivan Theater in midtown Manhattan. Letterman and staff delighted in exploring the new neighborhood — in taking the show out of doors in a kind of precursor to what is happening on network morning shows now — and a whole new set of TV viewers seemed to delight in Letterman.
The semi-official story is that two things happened that let Leno overtake Letterman’s huge early lead, beginning with the kickoff of Hugh Grant’s serial apology tour on “Tonight” in the summer of 1995. The first is that TV logic dictated the initial ratings glow had to wear off; a nightly talk show could not sustain that level of excitement. The second is that the CBS network was making many bad business decisions — losing NFL football and a batch of affiliates — that caused a network-wide popularity slump.
There is truth to both explanations, but there is more to it than that. Letterman was host for the Oscars in March 1995 and was not universally acclaimed. His hosting stint was not perfect, as he took his anti-Hollywood attitude and too much of his own show into the heart of the film community, and it played a little arrogant. But it was also often very funny and never less than interesting and certainly not the unmitigated disaster he made it out to be, as he mythologized it during monologues afterward.
The tendency to self-flagellation — which longtime viewers understood as crucial to Letterman’s makeup — likely played differently to the newcomers, who saw in it the host himself granting them permission to turn away. Many took him up on the invitation.
More important to his core audience, the ones who would end every 1980s collegiate weeknight, even Fridays, by being sure to catch Letterman, the show was spinning out of control. Under the enormous pressure of having a No. 1 show at 10:30 nightly, and of seeing that lead inexorably slipping, Letterman seemed to change, just a bit, just enough. He never got ridiculous, never came off as a man campaigning for viewership, high-fiving the audience and such. And there never seemed to be a show where he or his staff didn’t deliver something to make the act of viewing worthwhile.
But he did seem to be pressing. There were some disconcerting notes of obsequiousness with his big-name guests, as though he were trying to butter them up for repeat appearances, the antithesis of the star-skeptical Letterman of earlier years. There were other shows where his face, if it were letters, would have spelled out “cranky,” or even “despondent.”
And, mostly, there was the bombast of it all. “There was a point there where it felt like we were running a circus,” says executive producer Burnett, who was head writer at the time and has been with Letterman since 1985. “Every night, it was, `OK, we’ve got lions. Oh, look, the “Tonight Show” has got elephants. So now we have lions on top of elephants. And they’re gonna have a clown on top!”
Being in the big, new theater, and trying to do a show to fill it, was exciting, Burnett says. “But if you’re not careful, the theater can run you. And it was not the kind of show you could do forever.”
“At some point,” says Burnett, “we thought, `This is not funny. It’s just loud.’ ” So the focus, he says, became on making the show a comfortable place for the host. “We decided we’re not under the big top anymore. We didn’t get into this for ratings. Let’s just try and do a nice show that we enjoy.”
Devotees of the show knew that the true star wasn’t on the couch next to Letterman — no matter whether the guest was Mel Gibson or, from the early days, Brother Theodore — but was lurking inside his cranium. It’s great to see him back there.
