David Letterman: Man of the year

After chatting restlessly with Pierce, eyes rolling like a slot machine that won't pay off, Letterman interrupted Pierce's closing riff.

Pierce: Yes, I'm going to get right back to Emma. And?

Letterman: Well, I don't think the dog's still watching.

Pierce: [Gamely] I just have the feeling the commercials are her favorite part. She ?

Letterman: I think the dog may be with Mr. Koppel now. I have kind of that feeling about things.

Letterman looses such zingers almost every weeknight. They're the stuff of the white-bread high-school boys' room, founded in knowing suspicion about every aspect of human nature. He couldn't even resist one in the press conference announcing his confrere Tom Snyder's new slot following Late Show. When Snyder mused, "A year and a half [ago], who was Heidi Fleiss?" Dave instantly gibed: "Aw, you knew who she was, Tom. Come on — you knew."

Such jabs, and their quick-witted author, are as Midwestern as a grain elevator, as determinedly archproletarian as the fried-bologna sandwiches Letterman has made his mom describe on the air. If his Tonight Show rival Jay Leno is decidedly Eastern, with his cloth-coat folksiness, Letterman shares with Johnny Carson a certain irreducible farm-belt loneliness. Somewhere not too far behind him is one of those bleak outskirts-of-town intersections where the stoplight swings in a breeze that's made partly of arctic air. His jaggedly sarcastic grin and mock-angry stares speak of human distances, not connections. A nightly horde of Late Show With David Letterman fans out there in the dark likes things that way. More assured than Leno, Letterman has become the hip young modern's nightcap of choice. Somehow it's the mean laughs that work best — a little something astringent to brace your subconscious for the long, unguarded hours to come.

Following Pierce that Friday, Carlin speed-rapped so single-mindedly that Letterman asked, "You really don't need me out here at all, do ya?" (Coming out of the break, Paul Shaffer's CBS Orchestra played "Cocaine.") And Bon Jovi's lachrymose ballad never caught fire. "Again, it's my fault," says Letterman, inconsolable till he'll try again Monday. "I ought to be able to figure out a way to, 'Come on, we're going to fly this son of a bitch, let's go!' But I couldn't get air under the wings."