I have no idea who Maya Rudolph is but she is claiming Letterman humiliated her in 2009 by mispronouncing her name, even though he apologized. WTF? None of the stories tell what he said and why that would humiliate her. Anyone know?
I gather he just said “Maya” wrong. And he apologized. As someone who mispronounces a lot of things, I think she should have corrected him and then forgot about it.
I’ve got a central european name that almost no one gets right. I could get an article in People magazine!
No, she said she felt humiliated and embarrassed, not that Letterman humiliated her.
The way I read it, she felt humiliated. It doesn’t mean he humiliated her.
I owe you a beer.
Also:
Maybe read the article?
Correct. But is her name pronounced oddly? Seems pretty simple. Isn’t it “My-yah”?
May-a?
My-a?
who knows.
Well I can see some of her roles listed. She seems like a very fragile person back then. I mean, it’s Letterman. Him mispronouncing something seems like a good opportunity to get some banter going.
“It’s pronounced ‘My-ah,’ Dav.”
Well you have to remember that this is a man who was fascinated by the fact that Oprah kind of rhymes with Uma. 
Mulva?
This isn’t one of those Sade = “Shar-day” things is it? Is her name pronounced, “Mah-Jay” or something?
Her name was pronounced correctly every single Saturday night on national TV for seven years. Letterman mispronounced it two years after that stint ended when everybody in the country knew who she was except, apparently, Letterman and the OP.
The Wall Street Journal article that this is based on is behind a paywall for me, but I can see the first paragraph, which says “But years ago, when it came to public-facing parts of her job—interviews, talk shows, red carpets—she would find herself unable to be funny.” So I’m guessing that this was offered as one off-hand example of how she wasn’t very comfortable or media-savvy back then.
And then, I suspect, other, tabloidier media sources picked up this relative nothingburger and blew it out of proportion to use as clickbait.
So you think he did it on purpose? That doesn’t sound like Letterman to me.
I’ll give him a little less slack because talking on TV was his actual job, and I’m sure someone told him who the guest would be that night (and presumably pronounced her name right) But, my god, people mispronounce things all the time. At least I do. I did a trial once and kept getting my client’s name wrong in front of the jury (and I had been working for her for two years and knew her name).
Who knows? Maybe he thought it would be funny. It wouldn’t be the first time he made that kind of miscalculation on the fly. He certainly thought it was funny to always mispronounce the name of the second largest city in the country.
She should have just been happy to be on Letterman in the first place.
Just because someone is a performer (actor, comedian, singer, etc.) doesn’t mean that they like, are happy about, or are good at promoting themselves, talking about themselves, or appearing as themselves on talk shows. I doubt I would be.
The outrage machine is still working