TORONTO — “Our theatre has been broken into twice, and we thought we were having a third break-in, but it was just a guy that wants his money back.”
That was David Letterman’s crack Wednesday night about back-to-back break-and-enters at the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York.
But if you’ve been watching the Late Show with David Letterman lately, you may have sensed a kernel of truth in the joke.
The 64-year-old talk show host, dare I say it, seems to be mailing it in, and less and less interested in the job he’s held for 29 incredible years.
He kids longtime bandleader Paul Shaffer about never going to rehearsal anymore, but he really doesn’t and it shows. Letterman probably figures he’s just as funny when he’s screwing up the cue cards, which he sometimes is.
The Friday shows are taped Mondays, allowing Letterman to get out of Manhattan for long weekends (a perk he’s surely earned). But why not double up on Thursdays? The four-day lag takes all the zip and immediacy out of the Friday monologue. Those generic jokes make Friday’s shows seem like reruns, with lower ratings the result.
In the second act of the show, the segment after the monologue, there are nights when it seems like Letterman is winging it. He may be going for the casualness and spontaneity of his adored mentor Johnny Carson, but Carson never had to compete with Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel and Jay Leno.
Fans wait in vain for Letterman to bust out favourite bits like Know Your Current Events or Stump the Band. The Top 10 List remains, often a showcase for somebody in the news (or Dave’s mom Dorothy, who returned via satellite earlier this week for a 90th birthday salute), but there are nights when Letterman seems to resent doing even that.
The days when Letterman use to go out on location and tape killer comedy bits (cruising with Zsa Zsa Gabor; working the drive-thru window at a fast food eatery) are long gone. Now surrogates do Letterman’s leg work. Today Show host Matt Lauer got laughs this week throwing a garbage can through the front doors of the Sullivan Theater.
Television academy voters have noticed. This is the second year in a row that Letterman is not among those nominated for a Best Late Night Emmy award. Letterman joked about that all week, but there seemed to be a bitterness to his barbs.
The frustrating thing for viewers is that, given the right guest, Dave still has it. You see flashes of that razor sharp intellect when he was a favourite guest on, like Tom Hanks or Bill Murray. Sometimes a new guest with a different rhythm, like Crazy, Stupid, Love Canadian film star Ryan Gosling — playful and oddball the other night — wakes up a sense of fun and mischief in the host.
Meanwhile — and this may be why Letterman seems to have a “what’s the use” attitude — Leno has crept back up into the 11:35 p.m. lead. After all that sturm und drang, all the hammering Leno took for “stealing” back the Tonight Show from O’Brien, Leno is still the choice of more American viewers.
Maybe that’s why Letterman treated the young Harry Potter cast members who visited his show recently with what seemed like boredom and contempt. Letterman made it clear he wouldn’t go see the wizard film if Voldemort commanded him to do it, churlishly ignoring the wild box office popularity of the films.
It used to be cool for Letterman to take a contrary stance — that’s why we watched. He wasn’t going to bow to the Hollywood studio promotional machine and we loved him for it.
But his sandbagging of poor Emma Watson a week ago came off as a dad scolding his daughter for getting drunk at the prom. Picking on contemporaries like Cher or Madonna is a highlight clip. Picking on Potter kids seems creepy.
Letterman has always taken his cue from Johnny and that may mean he’ll walk away at the end of his current CBS contract (which has another full season to run). He hinted to Howard Stern earlier this season that that was probably his plan. He does have young Harry at home and a passion for Indy car races.
Carson called it quits at 66. He seemed to leave at exactly the right time, a rarity in sports or show business. What may be giving Letterman pause is that Carson was pretty much never heard from again.
Letterman has survived scandal, open heart surgery, shingles, even Sarah Palin. He rose like a champion out of the ashes of the 9-11 attacks, calming and speaking for a frightened and bewildered nation. For every late night host who came after him, he is their Carson.
I’ll watch him until his very last show. I’d still kill to sit in the Ed Sullivan Theater (although now I’ll probably have to break in). He’s the one interview I never got and always wanted.
Writing about how Letterman went out on top will take the sting out of that. Go for the season 30 victory lap, Dave, and go down swinging.
Bill Brioux is a freelance TV columnist based in Brampton, Ont.