David Letterman
David Letterman is a prominent figure in American television, best known for his groundbreaking work in late-night talk shows. He began his career as the host of NBC's Late Night with David Letterman in 1982, where he quickly established a unique style characterized by playful irony and self-referential humor. Letterman's approach diverged from traditional talk shows by integrating his crew into comedic routines and creating segments that transformed the mundane into entertainment, such as viewer mail readings and unconventional stunts. His interviews, often unpredictable, contrasted with the polished format of predecessors like Johnny Carson, leading to memorable and sometimes tense exchanges with celebrity guests.
After a highly publicized rivalry, Letterman moved to CBS in 1993 to host The Late Show with David Letterman, where he continued to innovate the genre until his retirement in 2015, amassing over six thousand episodes and receiving numerous accolades, including multiple Emmy Awards. In 2018, he returned to television with a Netflix series called My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, featuring in-depth interviews with notable figures. Letterman's influence on late-night television is significant, as he introduced new comedic elements and laid the groundwork for future talk shows, making him a pivotal figure in the evolution of American entertainment.
On this Page
David Letterman
- Born: April 12, 1947
- Place of Birth: Indianapolis, Indiana
Originally regarded as a kind of young person’s Johnny Carson, Letterman quickly developed his own style of comedy, establishing a format that would be widely imitated by the late-night television hosts of the next generation.
When David Letterman debuted as the host of NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman on February 1, 1982, he faced the dual challenge of maintaining the entertainment standards of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (which he immediately followed in NBC’s programming schedule) and of developing an audience for late-night, talk-show comedy among a generation assumed to be too young to embrace Johnny Carson as its own. As if sensing the absurdity of being expected to realize two such contradictory goals simultaneously, Letterman immediately established as the tone of his show the relaxed, self-referentially playful irony that he had honed during the 1970s as a comedy writer and a stand-up comedian. Coincidentally, the growing influence of postmodernist studies was beginning to popularize just such self-reflexive humor among his target audience: college students.
Like Carson, Letterman involved his sidekick, the show’s bandleader Paul Schaffer, in both his banter and his routines. Unlike Carson or any other talk-show host up to that time, Letterman frequently utilized the members of his crew, making unlikely stars of his writers, cue-card holders, and camera operators. He also developed the comic potential of the mundane, getting creative mileage (and ever-increasing ratings) from activities such as reading viewer mail; interviewing unsuspecting Manhattan store owners; “stupid” pet tricks; and dropping bowling balls, watermelons, and other otherwise uninteresting objects off the tops of tall buildings.
Large portions of Letterman’s show were scripted and thoroughly rehearsed, but the interviews with the show’s guests were not. This situation—given Letterman’s willingness to needle even the most famous celebrities—led to some notoriously tense moments, especially when the celebrities did not share Letterman’s sense of humor. (The actor Nastassja Kinski, for example, vowed never to return to his show after her on-air hairdo served as the butt of his unwelcome jokes.) This element of unpredictability, however, only made the show more popular, giving viewers reared on television’s more pat conventions a fresh reason to tune in. By forcing guests out of their familiar personas, Letterman provoked some of television’s earliest “real” moments, thus laying, if inadvertently, the groundwork for the reality television of the twenty-first century.
In 1993, Johnny Carson retired from The Tonight Show, prompting speculation that NBC would replace Carson with Letterman. After NBC offered The Tonight Show to Letterman’s late night rival Jay Leno, Letterman ended his affiliation with the network and moved his show to CBS, where it was known as the Late Show with David Letterman. In 2014, Letterman announced that he would leave Late Show in 2015. By the time he signed off of the show for the last time on May 20, 2015, he had hosted a combined total of more than six thousand episodes between his two late shows over thirty-three years, making him the longest-serving late night television talk show host in US history. For his work on Late Night, Letterman won four Primetime Emmy Awards and twenty-one nominations, while for the Late Show he won one Primetime Emmy and twenty-six nominations during its run. Letterman’s other awards include a 2011 Johnny Carson Comedy Award, 2012 Kennedy Center Honors, two Peabody Awards (1991 and 2015), and the 2017 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
In August 2017 Letterman announced that he was returning to television in 2018 with a six-episode talk show series for Netflix. Following its premiere in 2018 featuring Barack Obama as its first guest, the series, titled My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, aired a second season of five episodes in 2019 and earned two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Informational Series or Special. Praised by audiences and critics, by that point the series had seen Letterman conduct long-form interviews with figures such as Malala Yousafzai and Melinda Gates.
In the 2020s, Letterman made guest appearances on shows and in films. In 2022, he was featured in Norm Macdonald: Nothing Special. In 2023, he was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and in 2024 he made an appearance on Stupid Pet Tricks.
Impact
Despite adopting the trappings of The Tonight Show, Letterman adapted them to his own comic purposes, adding original routines and elements that would become standards among television talk shows and exemplifying the possibility of innovation within even the most well-established of formats.
Bibliography
Dunn, Brad. When They Were Twenty-Two: One Hundred Famous People at the Turning Point in Their Lives. Riverside, N.J.: Andrews McMeel, 2006.
Goldberg, Leslie. “David Letterman Returning to TV with Netflix Talk Show.” The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Aug. 2017, www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/david-letterman-returning-tv-netflix-talk-show-1027577. Accessed 20 May 2024.
Itzkoff, Dave. “David Letterman, Ending an Era, Goes for Laughs Instead of Tears.” The New York Times, 20 May 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/arts/television/closing-out-a-late-night-era-david-letterman-goes-for-laughs-instead-of-tears.html. Accessed 20 May 2024.
Letterman, David. Late Night with David Letterman. New York: Random House, 1985.
Letterman, David. The Late Night with David Letterman Book of Top Ten Lists. Edited by Leslie Wells. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.
Sheffield, Rob. "Why 'My Next Guest Needs No Introduction' Feels Like Vintage David Letterman." Review of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, created by David Letterman. Rolling Stone, 13 Feb. 2018, www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/why-my-next-guest-needs-no-introduction-feels-like-vintage-david-letterman-201409/. Accessed 20 May 2024.