David Letterman's Shtick Shift : Rolling Stone

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But the last time Carson got mad on the air was at the National Enquirer. He is nowhere threatened. Letterman is still out to find the fakes. And the biggest fake of all is his own business. "I was listening to the radio in the car the other day," he says in his office, "and I heard an interview with the heads of Showtime, HBO and Disney cable, and they all said cable was bad because the studios were making such bad pictures, and it made me want to jump out of the car and call in. I mean, I wanted to wring their necks! I mean, no! You can't blame the problem on the people who produce movies! No! It's your goddamn problem! Stop buying it! It's like the people running a school cafeteria where kids are sick from trichinosis, blaming the meat manufacturer. Stop buying the ham!"

Television trichinosis. That's Letterman's obsession. He is, above all, a broadcaster. He loves AM radio, and the strike shows were a terrifying high for him — "what television ought to be — you take the technical elements and make a show out of them." His joke is pure broadcast, born unto itself. Letterman isn't beholden to Broadway, to movies, to the ghost of Fred Allen or even to books. He is a first-generation television baby.

But lately, his product has changed — just a little, yet significantly. Bush's selection of fellow TV child Quayle turned Letterman's anger from television to the future of this country. "Maybe I wouldn't have felt as strongly if he had come from Montana," Letterman says, but Quayle — forty-one and from Indiana — was the anti-Letterman ... or maybe not.

"At first when they chose him, I was kind of delighted," Letterman says. "We were both from Indiana. But it was kind of like watching someone being pushed out of a truck at top speed. Ooooh! I felt a little — ooooh! — a little empathy. They really ought to stop this. I see him as a guy you met in a fraternity who got C's and D's. That's fine. But don't, for gosh sakes, go running for vice-president.

"I tried to join the National Guard also," he says. "In 1969, I left campus. I had a student deferment. I was eight credits shy. I was instantly reclassified 1A. I passed the physical and was ready to go. Thirty days later, Nixon instituted the lottery system. I said to myself, 'God, I've got to get into the National Guard.' I started thinking about how to get into the guard, and I applied. I was turned down." Then Letterman's number came up in the lottery. It was in the mid-300s, and he stayed home.

"I saw a videotape the other day of the speech where he gave the quotation from Bobby Knight," Letterman says of a wildly garbled defense ad-lib that Quayle had attempted in Chicago, "and I thought I saw several gaping shafts of light going through his skull. Then I saw him in Wyoming, and some reporter asked him, 'What message do you have for farmers?' and he thought and began to say something; then he thought for a second and decided not to say anything and just smiled. It's like me running for vice-president — only I wouldn't run. It's like this is fun, not being burdened by the idea that you have to have something to offer, plus you get a hot lunch on a plane."

It was too close. It had gone beyond creating TV for a generation of Lettermen; Quayle was his generation's first public presentation. This had nothing to do with more fun than humans are supposed to have, and here's our top-ten list from the home office in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was a stupid human trick that wasn't funny. Was there nothing in this culture that one could depend on and admire? He could go on smashing television forever, but what did he have to compare it to?

"I was driving out west recently, and I visited Hoover Dam," he says, still holding on to the baseball bat. "It was completed in 1935, two years ahead of schedule." Suddenly he looks up, a little surprised not to be mad. "This is a work not to be believed. They have not had to replace one element used for its construction. It irrigated the area around it. It put a lot of people to work. If we had to commission something like it today, would it be close to it? This is a monument, a statement to the world that America is the best place there is. A monument." For a moment, David Letterman sounded almost oratorical. There was something he liked. There was something he believed in. So what if it was Hoover Dam? It made sense — it wasn't found comedy, it was found drama.

The America he talks about is dumb (stupid in Letterman-speak); it is sublime. He revels in Americans; he is mad at Americans. He is the captivated, furious observer of the wild framed portrait that is American television — he has watched it closer than you and I, and it drives him crazy. So he fights with American inertia, stick by stick of furniture, guest by guest. This is how David Letterman has chosen to come into the Nineties. It is a nutty, crazy, Oval Office kind of thing.

[From Issue 538 — November 3, 1988] Related Stories: