I’ll second this vote…I still want to know what Crispin was on that night (or is he just like that all the time?)
“I can kick…” :eek:
I rarely watch Conan, but I did catch Gun-totin’ NASCAR Jesus.
Showing my age again, but Steve Allen did some of the whackiest stuff ever. Holding a demolition derby in the studio parking lot (I think he was one of the drivers); he and his stage crew dressed in “kids’” army uniforms and brandishing toy rifles and laying siege to the supermarket next to his studio (I think it was the “Ranch Market”); he and a guest being hoisted on seperate cranes to face one another on a table several stories off the ground to play “Ping-Pong In The Sky”.
Unlike Johnny Carson, David Letterman has always said that he has borrowed heavily from Steve Allen’s late night show from the early 1960’s.
That makes two of us.
I f*cking hate that segment. I’ve been watching Dave for 20 years now and that has got to be the most annoying bit he’s ever come up with.
One of Andy Kaufman’s Letterman appearances (not the infamous getting-smacked-by-Jerry-Lawler one), wherein he was accompanied by three young black men. Kaufman announced that he had “adopted” the men and that he had been teaching one of them to type. A typewriter was brought out and the audience tittered nervously as the young man plucked clumsily at it while Kaufman encouraged him, much as a father encourages his baby son to eat his strained peas. When Kaufman and “sons” returned to the set to chat with Dave, the “sons” sat around Kaufman, on the arms of his chair and one behind him, lending an even weirder vibe to the whole spectacle.
I saw this twice, first when it originally aired and a second time on the E! channel many years later. It occured to me on the second viewing that these men may have been prostitutes. Did anyone else see this?
This was exactly what I thought of when I read the title! That was sooo weird… If I remember correctly, after Glover tried to drop-kick Letterman, Dave actually walked off the stage, leaving Glover standing out there all by himself. Also if I remember correctly, Glover later claimed that it wasn’t him, that it was somebody else who was pretending to be him. :dubious:
Thanks. He was before my time, but I was hoping someone would show up and tell us some of the things he did.
I didn’t see it live, but my parents were kind enough to tape a segment from the night before, because they thought I would like it. In the mid-to-late-80’s (when I was too little to stay up late), Letterman put a camera in the Mets’ bullpen. Doc Gooden and another (two?) pitcher(s) were throwing at the camera trying to break it. Innovative, funny stuff.
It came close, and I thought about mentioning this one, but it fell short. That they would try to go on at all was admirable, but it only lasted maybe 10-15 minutes before going to a re-run. I don’t know if the technicalities prevented them from doing much more with the show, but it’s that type of situation that can become comedy legend. I would have loved to see Conan go outside and talk to people, or bring people into the studio. They could have done more than just sit at a desk and recap what happened.
One of my favorite characters from Conan is the “Coked-up Werewolf.” A werewolf comes out in a Miami Vice suit, and keeps rubbing his nose and sniffing. There was one time when “hidden camera footage” showed how he became a coked-up werewolf. Turns out he was always a werewolf, but was bit by a cokehead.
On April 20 of last year (don’t ask how I know that), Jim Carrey was on Letterman’s show. He said he’d been trying to think of something new and original to do on the show, and it occurred to him that the one thing that’s never been done on a talk show is, of course, not talk. Dave didn’t seem too hip on the idea, but he went along with it anyway.
So Dave and Jim Carrey sat there, not talking, for probably a full minute (an eternity in screen-time). They made some facial expressions, and the director cut back and forth between them just as if they were having a conversation, but they didn’t say anything at all. It would have been ideal to have complete silence during all this, but the audience was understandably roaring with laughter.
I thought it was brilliant. This is exactly the kind of performance art I want to see on a late-night show; I don’t watch Dave because I want to learn about Nicole Kidman’s new movie. Then again, I also loved the one where they walked around outside with Amy Sedaris looking for rats.
There was a book out with a copyright date of 2004 about rats in New York City. It got a great deal of coverage for a book of its kind, so that may have been it.
Robin
There was an episode of Late Night With David Letterman where they taped the show in his office instead of the studio. They were packed in there shoulder-to-shoulder. Paul had one of those little Casio keyboards on his lap. Teri Garr was one of the guests (of course) and Letterman convinced here to take a shower in the little shower stall that was there in his office. Everybody ogled her silhouette on the shower curtain while she cursed him out.
I remember that too. That’s was when Letterman was actually creative.
The Late Show also did some whacked out hings with reruns like play back all the audio with dubbed voices, or run the show at slightly higher speed. One episode the TV picture slowly rotated clockwise for the entire show.