It Looks Like David Letterman Is Really Retiring

5/13/2015

I avoided David Letterman for years, but it was hard to avoid our son’s guffaws. He would come home late from working as a busboy and would turn on the television

“What in the world was so funny?” I would ask the next day.

“Dave was throwing watermelons off the roof,” our son would reply. Oh.

Never a fan of late-night TV, I avoided Letterman until my wife and I took an apartment in Florida, much too young for that kind of thing. There wasn’t much to do in the evening, so I gravitated to Letterman who by that time had moved from tossing watermelons to wandering around suburban subdivisions knocking on doors. It wasn’t in the least bit funny. I think of them as Letterman’s Lost Years.

Still, I became hooked on Letterman’s sour moods, his distracted interviews, his foolish audience-participation games, his apparent disinterest in most of the music, the Freudian working-stuff-out cameos by his mom. He was an acquired taste -- a grumpy guy dealing with major heart surgery and 9-11 and that obviously nasty fling with the intern.

Dave's strange routines (traced and parsed in Wednesday's New York Times) made him part of my trinity of flawed television role models – joining Tony Soprano and Clint Eastwood’s gunslinger and assembly-line bigot. I made sure to watch Dave late at night, because you never knew.

I loved his loyalty to standup comedians, his repartee with old pros like Regis Philbin and Martha Stewart (he upgraded her totally marginal financial conviction to “she killed a guy.”) And I shared his affection for Julia Roberts and some guests of the female gender. (Salon.com ran a top-ten list of Letterman crushes and never even mentioned his gushing about Cate Blanchett.)

One night Dave interviewed Natalia Makarova (whom my wife and I had seen in Lincoln Center, summer of 1971 -- the most transfixing evening of ballet we have ever had.) Dave had met Makarova when both were honored at the Kennedy Center; he gave her total respect on his show.

Ever since Letterman announced his retirement as of May 20, I have been unable to watch his show. It’s over. I never watched Johnny Carson or Jay Leno and I doubt I will ever watch Stephen Colbert. (Jimmy Fallon and Marco Rubio have blurred into the same persona -- a hyper comedian I call El Joven.)

Alas, my walkabout meant I did not see Michelle and Barack Obama. I missed Tina Fey – greatest eyes on television -- strip down to her skivvies. Thank God for youtube.

I did catch a snippet of Dave talking about the chasm that awaits him upon the dreaded R-word. Is it more shtick or real terror? My advice to him is, sometimes it’s very healthy to get off the high wire. How many insipid sit-com actors or loutish baseball managers can you interview in a lifetime?

Dave will be fine -- in his own miserable way. Plus, he can always go on the roof of his own home and chuck off a few watermelons.

Thanks, man.

The suave side of Dave; Natalia Makarova, Kennedy Center award, 2012

Altenir Silva

5/13/2015 07:49:54 am

Dear George,
I love late-night shows. When I can, I like to see all the Jimmys (Kimmel and Fallon), Conan and Letterman.
In Brazil, we have a great host and comedian named Jô Soares. He speaks many languages and has written some books.
Here he’s talking with the late Leonard Nimoy, when he was in Brazil.
The link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjfSpTnteb4
Have a good week,
Best - Altenir

Brian Savin

5/13/2015 05:10:08 pm

Yes, Letterman is an acquired taste, but once acquired you keep going back to it like a second martini you might be better off avoiding. For a long time he wasn't much liked in my family, me included. Back in the eighties he was interested in acquiring some vacation property. When a relative found out it was his property he was interested in, he took it off the market, saying not here thank you. Everyone changed their view once he started Late Night. I kind of ran into him once in New Caanan. Driving down a street in town there was a black BMW edging out of a store lot and he was the driver wearing his college-style jacket and signature stupid grin. I stopped to let him out, mostly startled that I so quickly recognized him, and got a wave in return. I must have been a member of his audience a half dozen times since and loved each show. It's nice of you, George, to host a blog where we can share our hidden addictions to this guy. This is all private, right?

George Vecsey

5/14/2015 12:51:29 am

Brian, funny, I've never been in the audience.
Once, before I got hooked on Letterman, my wife and I were walking around Broadway and somebody asked if I wanted to be interviewed by Dave -- to be another dolt on the street. I declined. Years later, I was sorry. Goodness knows what embarrassment could have ensued.
Yes, whatever you share here does not get past 11 or 12 regulars from Brazil to Israel. And of course the NSA. GV

Roy Edelsack

5/14/2015 06:52:42 am

I'm completely agnostic on Letterman but Makarova, oh my! I saw her as Juliet with the Royal Ballet many years ago and she did something magical. Flushed with excitement having just met Romeo, she leaps onto her old nursemaid's lap, knees first. But in leaping she appeared almost weightless and landed light as a feather; didn't even ruffle the nursemaid's skirt. If one didn't know better one would have thought she was on wires.

Amazing and unforgettable.

George Vecsey

5/14/2015 10:25:25 am

Roy, thanks. We are not regulars...happened to go on the July 4 weekend in 1971...cannot remember the program, only that the audience seemed very international...lot of Russian and French...magic night, she was electric, although I cannot describe it as well as you do. best, GV

John McDermott

5/14/2015 08:48:19 am

I've never, ever liked him. Early on his humor too frequently depended upon ridiculing people who were peculiar or "different" in some way and unaware they were being made fun of. It was cruel at times, and just not very funny. But it made him popular with a segment of the public who did find him entertaining. I just found it juvenile. His mother should have given him a timeout. Too bad Carson is dead and Cavett no longer has a nightly show.

Brian Savin

5/15/2015 11:43:49 pm

John, late night hosts remind me of something Stravinsky once said about Wagner: "Wagner has glorious moments........and God awful quarters of an hour."

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

It Looks Like David Letterman Is Really Retiring

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