David Letterman's Shtick Shift

"When I think about television and show business," Letterman says in his office, "it grinds my stomach. I want to say to people, 'Don't you understand this is just bullshit, driven by egos, and that's all it is?' I mean, nothing makes me madder than to be sitting there, watching somebody who's just the winner of the genetic crapshoot, and there they are, big stuff on the air, a star."

Letterman sighs and looks at the floor of the same office he's had for years, one that's a little shabbier than you might expect. It is twilight. His brow is actually furrowing, and he clutches the baseball bat. "I just don't get it," he says. "It just drives me crazy."

How could it not? He's edging perilously close to culpability himself. Now that David is in his forties, the Goliaths are more and more his contemporaries. And there is also the risk looming that Late Night itself — born and bred of the early Reagan years, when it led college children and baby boomers in passive rebellion — has found itself in danger of entering the Goliath spot. "We have to ask ourselves all the time," says Robert Morton, Letterman's producer, "'Are we becoming what we should be mocking?'"

For it has happened. The shift that everyone was waiting and waiting for has taken hold. It's not just the baby boomers taking over. Letterman has made the sensibility of television talk take a leap so that it's almost impossible to take the format straight anymore.

Letterman, however, was no revolutionary: "We were never hip," he says of the show. Morton says that they've never thought of the show as subversive, just as white-collar comedy. "We're just people who come to work every day and do comedy," he says, "the same way people come to work at the library." But Late Night has made a declaration about the intrinsic foolishness of television that is the opening flare signaling reassessment of other parts of public life as well. (Spy magazine is the Ivy League equivalent of Letterman's Big Ten satire.)

What is going on with Letterman is that the precise generational shift that sociologists and political scientists have promised is rumbling hard. It is an orderly transfer not only of power but of values, and it will not be complete until 1992, when Johnny Carson will have controlled the agenda for three full decades. Based on this, the 1988 election is really the last referendum on the old battle ground: Bush and the Pledge of Allegiance are last-gasp arguments. What Lettermanism represents is new alliances (an across-the-board political yearning for debunking), old enemies (bad culture, outmoded platitudes).

Letterman's audience roars. It doesn't applaud or go, "Hey-yo!" It roars. He's onto something, and the audience knows it. "Damn!" Letterman says sometimes in that Indiana accent. "Damn!" And the translation is "I don't understand this place any better than you do." In interviews, Letterman has made the point that in high school, "I was never with the really smart kids; I was never with the really good-looking kids; and I was never with the really great athletes. But there was always a small pocket of people I hung out with, and all we did was make fun of the really good-looking people and make fun of the really smart kids and make fun of the great athletes." Above all, he has represented the Geek Inheriting the Earth. He works on the basis that movie stars are no less geeks than he or his audience, and to show that, he regularly takes geek images (Chris Elliott, Larry "Bud" Melman) and turns them into stars.

When Letterman's cameras cut in and out — going to the street, borrowing other NBC feeds, running into the control room, as fluidly as television can, faster than a movie — it serves a purpose. The Letterman viewers feel that he understands the medium, understands that it is only television, that it is within their control, that if Dave can turn cameras upside down and shoot the studio like he was running an A-V class, anybody can. This is his show's triumph. "Come on," he likes to say, "it's only television!" He represented the revenge of extended adolescence — but lately, he has found it necessary to consider growing up.

The trouble was, as the generational overtake began to move into high gear, the program found itself being shoved to the center. Quickly, the rest of television caught up with it. Joan Rivers was on the phone as well, and almost every comedy-talk show on the air was doing the video-explorer number. And this made Letterman a little frantic, for although his show runs on his sensibility, if he became television itself he would be — television. "There's nothing I love more," he says, "than getting hot over what's really bad." But when he is no longer in the position of being a counterpuncher on television, what will he do? Faster and faster, he is becoming television itself.

But not quite yet. Carson, The Nebraskan Uncle who found happiness and several wives in Malibu, the comic whose triumph was to bring topicality and attitude to all of America, has been staying astonishingly sharp. During the onslaught of the first Letterman shows, Carson suddenly seemed uncomfortably aware of the generational difference: his band and banter with Ed became an anachronism; he began casting about, trying to pick up Dave's tricks, often looking as uncomfortable as if he were wearing someone else's blazer. But in front of his curtain, adjusting his tie, he remains unchallengeable. Whatever else he does, Carson is the comedian of the agenda. He lays it out brilliantly in the monologue, as neatly as a clean desk. When the Bakkers showed up on the horizon, there was Johnny; when the Iran-contra hearings started, there was Johnny; When Bork came up, when Meese went down, when the vacuum pack known as Quayle was opened up for America, there was Johnny, as precise and unflinching as he had been when Lynda Bird Johnson met George Hamilton. "Comedy," Carson would often say when the audience had spotted his tungsten blade drawing real blood and began to turn against him, "is a cruel business." And his constituency understood that somebody had to do it.