David Letterman's Shtick Shift

One night in September, Late Night announcer Bill Wendell wound up his hyperbolic introduction of his talk-show boss with this: "And now, a man who is better equipped to be vice-president than Dan Quayle ... Daaaaaaaay-viiid Letterman!!!!!"

Certainly he is! For the torch is being passed. Media fed and video schooled, we know nothing better than how to respond to television. We have become a nation of Lettermen. This is no casual transfer: it is Turnover Time. When Dan Quayle came onto the national scene, one of Bush's top advisers described it as playing the generational card. But Letterman is another kind of generational card, a young man with a cigar, tested in peace, practiced in national office for the last seven years, serviced in speech communication, ready to address the audience of his nation.

But today the candidate is angry. David Letterman is pounding the floor of his office in the RCA Building with a baseball bat. Bam. "It's just bullshit!" he keeps saying. Bam. He says he is angry about television, but he's really angry about something else. The culture. "Come on," he says, his voice rising in genuine outrage. "Let's not be so readily entertained! Give it up! I think we're about to bring down the curtain on this society, and it's television that's doing it." Bam!

He rubs the bat between his hands. Why is television so bad? Why are people happy to watch it anyway? And if they are happy to watch it, why are they so happy to watch his show, which tries to devastate television every night? On one hand there is Dave, and on the other hand there is the video abyss — and on a bad night (aaaugh!) they can be one and the same. After all, he says, "on any given night we can turn out an enormous piece of shit." This is his dilemma.

"I know," he says, "that people are going to be sitting out there reading this, thinking, 'Dave's gone off the deep end. He's having a breakdown right there.' " But Letterman asks, "Why can you turn on the television any time of the day or night and find pro wrestling? How come? Tell me!"

It's a reasonable question, and it drives Letterman's comedy. For twenty-six years, Johnny Carson has prodded the content of American life, but Letterman aims at the form of television itself. Carson, a precise, surgical comedian, guided the nation through six presidencies and was, in fact, the president of comedy, governing cleanly, dispensing patronage, steering the dialogue, his staff supporting him as it would a head of state.

Then Letterman entered the talk-show mainstream by reinventing the genre called found comedy, which casts a cold video eye on the conventions of the landscape — dumb ads, bad TV, stores that advertise things they don't have. It was the high point of consumer comedy: Letterman got on the telephone and sent out cameras to try and gauge the disparity between what television had told us and what really existed. For six years and eight months, he has been shooting arrows at television, at the culture, and they never seem to fall back to earth, like the pencils that still hang from the acoustically dotted ceiling of his office. "I mean," he often says on the show, "what's the deal here?"

Letterman seemed Carson's heir apparent, and knowing it would do him no good to compete with Johnny's monologues, he tried the very worst jokes, pleasing the audiences with that statement about the rest of television. And at first he was bad at, almost embarrassed by, interviewing people. But he slowly became better at making his suspicion of convention work for him. His staff often points out his interview with boxing promoter Don King as the breakthrough: "Come on, Don," he said. "What's the deal with the hair?"

Dave had discovered a formula, which was to get to the point. This is a nation run by talk, dominated by talk, with an agenda set by talk — and television. Why does Jesse Helms go crazy protesting Dan Rather when Rather's power to interpret the news is as nothing compared to Carson's and Letterman's? Ask Jim Baker and Michael Deaver, who planned the Reagan administration by sound bites. Ask Gary Hart's staff, which knew the one condemnation Hart could not escape was Carson's monologue, or Governor Bill Clinton, who, after his disastrous speech nominating Dukakis in Atlanta, had to come to Johnny's desk to repair himself. When you want to know where we're going, there's only one fast road map, and it's under the talk-show desk. Because the television joke guides the nation, and whoever owns it controls more than just the arena of the laugh — that person controls the American playing field of values. What Reagan did, ostensibly, was control America's frame of reference. But hasn't Carson? And won't Letterman? The playing field is the rectangle of the television screen and its persistent, regular reach out.

So if you're going to suggest forty-one-year-old Hoosier J. Danforth Quayle for the vice-presidency, here's another forty-one-year-old Indiana boy for your consideration: David Letterman. Leadership for the Nineties.