Dave Letterman has had a late night tv show in some form for as long as I can remember. And I was once a big fan. For the longest time I taped his nightly show and watched it the next evening, but with a single vcr tape dedicated to that archive the new shows began to get recorded over unwatched shows.
The tipping point for me was the little joke routine they did with the great presidential speeches. There would be short clips of speeches from Kennedy, Eisenhower, Johnson, et al. Then they would show a clip with President Bush fumbling his words. Yuk yuk. Once it might be funny -- we know GWB is not glib. The second time maybe it's worth a smile. But over and over and over, and it soon became a tedious validation of Johnny Carson's rule of "one too many. " Dave Letterman does not like George Bush. We get it.
They've fawned over Hillary since she ran for the Senate, and I suspect they are fawning over Obama now. But they were bashing McCain long before McCain so famously stood up the Letterman show on 9/24/08. "John McCain is so old ... he's like the elderly relative who sends you a blank email."
So it was so refreshing to see Pulitzer Prize winner Dorothy Rabinowitz give Letterman a lashing. See The Other Letterman Show. Excerpt:
In the course of his complaints, Mr. Letterman lurched from fury to fervent wonder at John McCain's wartime heroism, to jibes that somebody had been putting something in the candidate's Metamucil -- a joke consistent with the Letterman show's now standard brand of comedy. It was impossible, needless to say, to mistake any of this for joking -- nothing in Mr. Letterman's tireless emissions on the subject spoke for anything but his rage.
and
When this election year is over we'll have chance to look back, too, on those kings of comedy who best reflected the current standards of wit, invention and don't forget -- class. We'll be thinking of you, Dave.
I don't think Johnny Carson would have done it like that, Dave.
Addendum: Just so you know I don't hate everything I see on tv, there are some good shows on. For late show viewing Craig Ferguson is a dynamo. He's a newly made American citizen, and hopefully he is still avoiding politics. He's funny in both words and gestures, plus he's got a cool accent. Check him out. And for my daily taping I grab the Bernie Mac reruns on the FX in the AM. It's quite entertaining. See previously.
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