I have gotten out of the Letterman habit pretty much. Mostly because I get sleepy before he’s on. But I think a large part of why those “gags” still work for me, and maybe for a majority of his audience as well, is that they are so unfunny. To me, Letterman’s appeal has always been his penchant for the ridiculous, for making mountains out of molehills, for beating dead horses and for finding absolutely uninteresting people to make “stars” of.
It does wear thin after a while, and that, too, is part of his schtick. I never fail to laugh (more like chuckle) at Alan Kalter’s absurdities, too.
It’s mindless comedy until you realize they may have spent all day working up a gag that was designed to fall flat.
I think the OP says what I was trying to say in a thread a couple of weeks ago in which I likened Peanuts creator Charles Schulz to David Letterman:
Sometimes, the very fact that he’s beating this dead horse, that he’s going on and on about this mundane thing, is funny; other times it’s just tiresome. I haven’t watched enough of Letterman lately to know which is predominating.
I haven’t watched Dave for years for that exact reason; I’ve been more of a Conan fan. But yikes, he’s starting to do it too! But considering the amount of comedy these guys have to pump out each week, they almost have to beat dead horses. I’ve always thought the late night shows are best watched sporadically for just this reason.
I think Letterman subscribes to a theory of humor I’ve heard discussed on the Simpson’s DVD commentaries: take something funny and keep repeating it. Eventually it will stop being funny. BUT, if you continue to repeat it longer, it will get funny again.
I’ve been a Letterman fan for since the “Late Night” days; I watch his show pretty much nightly, with rare exceptions, and I think his comedy is widely misunderstood by the general populace. The unfunny gags are satires of unfunny gags; the repetitive, bizarre segments are satires of the irredeemable crap that continues to pass for entertainment on so much of TV. “Will It Float?” is pure genius, especially with the added flash and dazzle of Hula-Hoop Girl and Grinder Girl.
(My favorite “Will It Float?” was the one when they brought out the big tank of water, played the dramatic music, had the models and Hula-Hoop Girl and Grinder Girl out there at a million watts, and then tested the buoyancy of… a car battery.)
Several things continue to amaze me about Dave’s show:
(1) The satire has managed to stay relevant over two decades. This is probably because most of what’s on TV continues to suck so, so hard, thus remaining ripe for–and in dire need of–a good satirizing.
(2) He’s managed to stay on the air so long. This is the kind of vicious wit that usually means a show is going to be cancelled after a season and a half.
(3) I know there’s debate about this, but I think it’s a miracle that he’s managed to avoid becoming the thing he impersonates: the stereotypical back-patting, oily schmoozer.
One other thing occurs to me: He hasn’t succumbed to Parental Lameness. We’ve seen this phenomenon over and over: A great comedian becomes a parent, and suddenly all their jokes revolve around how adorable it is when Little Johnny sings “Happy Berfday to Me.” (Robin Williams and Jerry Seinfeld spring to mind.)
But Dave hasn’t done it. On occasion he’ll talk about little Harry a bit, and he’s even showed home video of the kid once or twice, but most of the time he’s just as ruthless as ever.
A couple of weeks ago he had Amy Sedaris on, and because she is always completely weird, and usually has no ulterior motive of a movie or TV show to shill, and because she and Dave have become friends, their conversation turned to Dave himself and he actually, rather disarmingly, gave some honest and insightful commentary on what he felt about the show and his life.
It was one of the better episodes just for that reason, and I hope it’s considered so in the future.
That’s how I see a lot of Steve Colbert jokes too, such as how he always has bears as the top threat on the Threat Down. I was a little disappointed last time when he had them as number two: it would have been brilliant if he had them as number one right after that.
The repeated gags (“Will it Float?”, the Late Show Bear, the whole Oprah thing) don’t really bother me. The dead horse that annoys me enough that I’ve been known to change the channel for it is when he either:
Makes a joke with a bad punchline and then repeats the same punchline (or word) multiple times throughout the night. I remember one a few months back where he had this line that was something about “Wash it, gas it, and (something).” Drove me crazy!
Gets himself attached to some sound (lately it’s been “Zing!”) and just repeats it ad nauseum.
Unbuttons his coat, opens it a couple of times, and then closes it again.
I have a problem with things repeated over and over, especially when it’s done with the same inflection (small children and their “Mommy! Buy me this! Mommy! Buy me this!” routine send me right around the bend), and I don’t like stupidity. In these and similar habits, Dave combines the two.
I still like him, though. When he’s funny (which is often) he’s good.
It’s meant to be what one might call an “insider” in the real world. You know, you’re with a group of two friends, one friend says something of no real notice and one of the others laughs ridiculously. After they’ve recovered from laughing they reply to the other three, “Ah, you wouldn’t get it, it’s an insider.”
So it’s not like it’s not a form of minor comedy.
The thing about Og is it’s mostly just stupid looking and having a goofy pseudonym for god is probably over a thousand years old.
He’s one of the two premier comedians on network TV. Is he just satirizing Leno?
If Conan’s doing the same satirization of unfunny gags, then who’s being satirized now?
I find Dave, personally, funnier than Leno, but “The Late Show” is a creative wasteland. Even when they do break out a new bit, it FEELS old (is “float” any funnier than ramming fish tanks filled with guacamole with a train? is it any funnier than dropping a watermelon off a building?) and you feel like you know what’s going to happen for the next 3 months of the gag. . .Paul will play some stupid theme song, Dave will sit at the desk and do nothing except a couple little bits of shtick.
That show is old, old, old and with people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on every night I know how anyone can call Dave satirical. There is NOTHING edgy about Letterman’s show at all.
Late night TV is the McDonald’s of broadcasting. . .you go there because you know exactly what you’re going to get every night. And Dave is worse than Jan in that regard.
There was a time when Letterman was doing things on TV that no one else was doing, and he hadn’t done before. That was 1985. He has been in stagnation for 20 years.
An important thing to remember about Dave is he’s terribly insecure. He always thinks the show doesn’t work as well as it should, and he nearly always blames himself for it. The repeating-of-a-duff-punchline thing isn’t so much an attempt at satire as it is a nervous, masochistic tic, a morbid compulsion to revisit a moment of failure, like bumping your shin and then repeatedly poking the bruise.
I don’t watch late night TV, but when I do happen to see Dave, I still enjoy him; he seems to do what he wants to do and doesn’t give a crap if anyone likes it or not. In fact, he’d almost prefer you didn’t like it; it probably confirms his deep belief that he doesn’t really belong in this business in the first place.