David Letterman, From The Audience
I went to a taping of the Late Show in 1999, where a small thing made me into a big fan.
From The Audience
I went to a taping of the Late Show in 1999, where a small thing made me into a big fan.
By Jeremy Markovich
I knew it would be cold inside — 65 degrees — because that was something they kept playing up on the show. In the lobby, staffers came out and primed us. They wanted a lot of laughter and applause. There would be lighted signs to tell us when to do each. “Even if Dave says something that’s not funny, laugh,” one girl in a Letterman letterman jacket instructed us.
Also, don’t say woo, she said. Yeah is okay to say. Clapping is fine. But woo messes with the mics and doesn’t sound good on television. Let’s practice, the girl said. So the crowd, huddled in the white faux-Gothic small-than-I’d-imagined lobby, broke into applause. Over nothing.
A guy behind me loudly said woo.
The girl in the letterman jacket glared at him. Don’t do that, she said. And then she made us applaud again. The right way.
This was serious, I thought.
All of this transpired on a visit to New York City with my family in 1999. The reason, officially, was to go see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but that’s not why I was excited to be there. My parents had somehow scored tickets to go see a taping of The Late Show with David Letterman the night before. They had a much easier time getting tickets to Late Night with Conan O’Brien, which, unlike Letterman, was taping on Thanksgiving night.
We walked up Broadway and instantly knew the geography. The Ed Sullivan Theater! The Hello Deli! Rupert Jee himself! I was 19. I was in college. For the first time, I could stay up late and watch Letterman and Conan from the comfort of my tiny dorm room, instead of getting static from my parents that I should already be in bed. I finally got to see in person what I’d struggled to watch on TV for so long.
This was seven years into Dave’s run at CBS, and the onslaught of publicity about his move from NBC had turned Dave himself into something of a landmark. I never knew him as the wildly experimental goofball that came on after The Tonight Show. Conan had since grown into that role. The next night, in a tiny studio in Rockefeller Center, Late Night was everything I thought it would be. Funny. Weird. Flat, at points, but Conan had a way of squeezing a reaction out of every single joke, even ones that missed their marks by miles. Before the show, he came out to warm up the crowd, and zeroed in on an audience member who was doing a crossword puzzle. “I’m so glad you’re excited to be here, sir,” he said.
Conan, at 12:30, had nothing to lose. But Dave, at 11:30 and always running second to Jay Leno, had everything to lose. Hence the ominous instruction: Even if it’s not funny, laugh.
I loved Conan. I hated Leno. But Dave? He was somewhere in the middle of Conan and Jay, of binge-watching and hate-watching. I really didn’t watch him. I knew he was important, but I got that impression from my consistent osmosis of television and newspapers. Dave’s a big deal, they always told me, but they’d filtered him down to the point where it was hard to understand what he was really like. I really hadn’t formed an opinion on Dave when I walked into the Ed Sullivan Theater.
There were stupid pet tricks. I don’t remember a single one of them. Stephen Baldwin was the guest. I don’t remember what he and Dave talked about. Rudy Giuliani, who was New York’s mayor and was being goaded by reporters to go ahead and announce that he was running for the U.S. Senate, came out and read a Top Ten List of the announcements he’d like to make. Number one? “I’m engaged to Jerry Seinfeld.”
As I’d come to know, this was pretty normal Letterman fodder, the lists, the tricks, the guests. But as I also came to know, it was the little things he did — the uncomfortable questions, the odd but relatable rambling, the moments of sincerity, and the ability to keep pushing on a topic when others would have long since moved on — those were the things that made Letterman Letterman. Any Dave fan probably remembers a tiny little throwaway moment that turned them from a casual viewer into a lifelong fan.
My moment came as I sat in the audience that night, telling myself not to say woo. The show was being taped on Wednesday to run on Friday. Thanksgiving hadn’t happened yet. At the top of the show, Dave came strutted out and, after the crescendo of the CBS Orchestra, launched into his monologue.
He grabbed his stomach. “Man, I’m stuffed,” was the first thing he said.
It wasn’t much. I’m sure it didn’t play well on TV. But the audience roared. Unlike the people watching at home two days later, we were in on the joke. That one was just for us.
After that, he had me. I didn’t need to be told when to laugh.
Jeremy Markovich is a senior writer and editor at Our State magazine, and was formerly a columnist at Charlotte magazine, a utility infielder at WCNC-TV and a raft guide at the U.S. National Whitewater Center. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, son and dog. Follow him on Twitter at @deftlyinane.