I Miss Dave

Back in the mid-80s, I and a bunch of other nocturnal college-types around the country were among the many people who stayed up after the Tonight Show was over to watch a gap-toothed dorky guy do dorky things and have some very odd people on his program.

This guy, David Letterman, was a lot younger than the mainstay of late night, Johnny Carson. His monologues were hipper and he spent as much if not more time skewering some of the clueless famous folks who were on his show as he did talking to them about their upcoming book/movie/album. He had people like Calvert DeForest as Larry "Bud" Melman, a guy who was so out of place on television that his entire persona was part of the joke. There was Chris Elliot as "The Guy Under the Stairs," a creepy stalker-type that always got mad at Dave and ended his time with a promise to be watching everything Dave did.

"Stupid Pet Tricks," which were not always stupid and were often hilarious. The image of a Boston Terrier attacking an upright vacuum cleaner and dragging it clear across the stage is imprinted in my mind and still makes me chuckle. Dropping stuff off a forty-foot tower to see what it looked like when it hit. Dave wearing a suit covered in Alka-Seltzer tablets and being lowered into a tank of water (he also wore scuba gear because the carbon dioxide output of all those tablets would probably have killed him). Dave interrupting Bryant Gumbel during a Today Show broadcast by yelling out the window behind Gumbel, "I'm not wearing pants!"

Some of it was a miss -- despite his musical talent, I've never liked Paul Shaffer. Some of the "so dumb they're funny" bits were more dumb than funny.

I admired Dave's support of his friend Warren Zevon when Zevon was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. I admired Dave's serious and thoughtful interview with Dan Rather when he came back on the air several days after Sept. 11, 2001. I liked how Dave would, every now and again, tell a joke Carson sent him from retirement, and how he'd indicate a Carson joke by making a golf swing. I liked how, in his first new show after Carson's death, Dave had Doc Severinsen and Tommy Newsom on to play some of Carson's favorite numbers.

I always thought Dave should have followed Carson when Johnny retired. NBC picked Jay Leno, a man who has made me laugh as often as the show Seinfeld did, which is to say, quadrennially. Dave went to CBS and was winning in the ratings until Jay had Hugh Grant on to talk about why he'd rather pick up an LA street hooker than go home to Elizabeth Hurley. Leno won that night and stayed in first place in the ratings most of the time since, and I find that rather instructive.

A few years ago, I got onto a kick of watching Dave again after many years of not tuning in. He was still kind of funny, but after several months I stopped -- not for any reason that I can recall. I just noticed one night that I'd watched something else for awhile and didn't feel any need to switch back. I don't know whether Dave had gotten tired of being an ironist or I'd gotten tired of irony.

This little mean joke he made about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's daughter being "knocked up" by Alex Rodriguez isn't really the way I remember Dave. In his prime, Dave, I think, would have known that the Palin daughter with her mom on this trip was the 14-year-old, and put a hold on it even if he really had meant to snark on the older daughter, who is herself a mom now. I think Dave in his prime would have called Gov. Palin's look something like "hot librarian" rather than "slutty flight attendant," because it's funnier and because whatever target the Gov has on her back, flight attendants were ordinary folks who hadn't earned any kind of mean darts like that.

I remember Dave, like I said, skewering the pompous and famous for being just as dumb or whatever as anyone else even though they failed to understand that. I think that Dave would have a field day with reporters who make comments about our president being "sort of God" or giving supposedly clear-eyed talk-show hosts "a thrill up my leg." I think that Dave might have laid off an 18-year-old kid who's learning how to be a mom, especially when he waited six years to marry his son's mother. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe Dave has been around long enough now that he's become one of the people that he'd have been aiming at back in the day. Or maybe not; who's to say?

I just know I miss Dave.