The Mystery of David Letterman

David Letterman has been much in the news lately due to his fondness for the flesh of young female staffers, and the alleged blackmail plot regarding his exploits in that direction. It seems that old Dave is a bit of a lech who — like many powerful and wealthy individuals — uses his high social status to gain access to the sexual organs of women who would not look at him twice were he not so illustrious a figure. And so the furious debate rages in the papers, online and on cable news — will Dave survive the scandal? Will his audience follow him? The mystery for me however is much simpler — how did Letterman ever achieve the status he enjoys today?

Allow me to explain. I’m not from around these parts. I grew up in Scotland, spent a decade in Russia, and arrived in the US three years ago. As something of a night owl I soon found myself confronted with America’s strange, televisual dream-world of nocturnal gibberish, and the even more perplexing national obsession with the personalities, rivalries and ratings battles that played out between the competing purveyors of this gibberish. The big one of course was Leno vs. Letterman, but who could forget the death struggle for comedic dominance between Conan and Craig Ferguson? Then there was the mystery of Jimmy Kimmel, floating around like some moth that had lost sight of the moon, detached from these wars as if no one expected him to succeed anyway. And lurking in the deep, deep darkness was the awful horror that is Carson Daly: charmless, entirely unfunny and visibly drowning in his own misery.

What was most striking about these shows however was that they were all crap: boring, repetitious, filled with padding, and containing an endless stream of plugs for films and CDs delivered by sublimely tedious celebrities. I couldn’t understand why there were so many of these chat shows, why anybody watched them, or why — with so many writers — the hosts were at best only ever mildly amusing, and intermittently at that. Most of all I couldn’t understand the cult of David Letterman.

Now I’d heard of Letterman long before I arrived stateside. Back in the late 80s/early 90s a UK chat show host named Jonathan Ross was accused of ripping off Letterman’s format for his own late night broadcast. It didn’t harm him — Ross is still going strong, paid millions by the UK taxpayer to periodically offend the nation, and his show is currently broadcast on BBC America. I also have vague recollections of Letterman actually taping his show in London in the early 90s. This was considered an event and was broadcast on British TV; I switched off after about ten minutes. In fact, the influence of American culture on Britain is such that the legendary battle between Leno and Letterman for the throne of Johnny Carson was reported in our papers, even though we couldn’t watch the shows in question on our TVs. Why we were supposed to care I am not sure; after all, how many Americans are interested in the ratings battle between “Coronation Street” and “EastEnders“?

Arriving in the states, however, I kept hearing the name: Letterman, Letterman. So I decided to give his show another stab. But every time I tried to sit through an episode this is what I saw: a smug, lazy old bore, seething with suppressed rage and bitterness. The bitterness was intriguing: it always is when you see it in highly successful people, such as Letterman’s equally over-rated comrade in entertainment, the legendary Paul McCartney. In McCartney I understand it, however: he’s jealous of Lennon, who everyone knows was the greater talent in the partnership. But what’s eating Letterman? Is he still angry about Leno? Or is it that he’s filled with contempt for what he does, considering himself above the whole chat show schtick? Who knows? Who cares? Even when he caused outrage with his comments about Sarah Palin’s daughter I was more shocked by how complacent, how lazy he was. With an army of paid writers, this is the best he can come up with?

Lord knows I tried to understand Letterman, to grasp his place in the entertainment fundament. I heard he was ‘good in the 80s’ and thought that perhaps the cult of Letterman was like the cult of Iggy Pop (five good records, the last one recorded over 30 years ago) or Dennis Hopper (“Easy Rider,” “Blue Velvet,” then nothing) both of whom retained goodwill from a rabid fan following on the basis of long faded achievements. One lunchtime I even watched half a Biography channel special, hoping it would help me appreciate Dave’s illustrious past. There was something about an alka- seltzer suit in there, I recall. But to tell the truth I was more interested in the story of his relationship with his former head writer, Merrill Markoe, who apparently created many of the popular spots on his show. Even the soft-soap bio-channel approach made it look like he’d treated her badly.

Anyway, even with this blackmail scandal, I still can’t muster much enthusiasm for David Letterman: I’m more into the Jon and Kate meltdown, to be honest. Thus I am forced to conclude that perhaps Letterman is one of those aspects of American culture that just don’t translate for a foreigner. You need to have been born here for him to make sense, to have been steeped in the legend of Ed Sullivan, of Johnny Carson, to have been raised in the ancient mysteries of late night chat show nostalgia. Letterman is for the natives, like Root Beer or Beef Jerky.

Except I quite like Beef Jerky.