-Our first guest tonight is the
longest-serving late-night host in American television history
and the original host of this program, which premiered
40 years ago tonight. Please welcome back to his show
the one, the only David Letterman. [ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪ -Wow. Thank you very much. [ Cheers and applause ] Very kind.
Very nice. Thank you so much. -Thank you so much for
being here, David. -Well, thank you for having me. Thank you for being
so kind to me. I loved Amber and Jenny.
I love the band. And you're so lucky, because
everybody is excited to see you, and you come out
and you tell your jokes and they laugh at
your jokes and stuff. And of I had
that Amber-and-Jenny thing, I'd still be on the air. Somewhere. -Somewhere.
-What a great idea that is. -Yeah, their idea.
They came up with it. -And the music -- lovely. -Yeah,
they're really good. We got a great band.
[ Cheers and applause ] Now, I do want to make sure
we talk about the past a little bit --
your past. But the last time
you were here -- I want to just refer to this --
you brought a tick. -Oh, yes.
-Yeah. And that was the tick. And you asked us
to test it for Lyme. -Yes. And? -It turned out it just
had too much to drink. -Nothing worse than
a drunken tick, is there? -Walked out of here a
couple days later. Slept it off
and walked right out of here. -Well, so it's a win-win,
I guess, sure. -So, have you stayed healthy
through these last couple of years? -What have you heard?
-Um... [ Laughter ] -Yes, I have stayed healthy. And, honest to goodness, if it weren't for
your kind invitation, I would not have
known that this is the 40th anniversary of
the beginning of what you now do as the show. I would not have known.
-No idea? -So thank you again for that. -What were your memories
leading up to that night, the premiere? You had Bill Murray as
your first guest. -Oh, my God, yes.
Well, two things. First of all,
what was I consumed by? Paralytic fear.
-Mm-hmm. -Because we had blown up
the NBC daytime schedule a year previously. I -- We had a show -- A lot of us had a show that
we thought was just great. And it was on for 90 minutes,
live, like 9:00 to 10:30 on NBC. And it replaced
two or three game shows, and it turned out, America
didn't want them replaced. Certainly didn't
want them replaced by me. But when you're young, one of
the nice complementary features of being young is being dumb. -Mm-hmm. -And we all thought, "Oh,
television is the way television is because we're not there yet. When we get to television,
it'll be fine." We were wrong about that
and many, many other things. So, we were on the air for --
I don't know -- maybe six weeks. -That's it?
For the morning show. -That's it.
Six weeks, maybe two months. I don't know. And then I had to go to
the end of the line. -And how long did you
wait at the end of the line before "Late Night" happened? Not too long. -Well, speak for yourself. It seemed like an eternity. Because in show business,
if you screw something up like blowing up
a network's daytime schedule -- you're welcome -- you know,
it could be a while before they
call your number again. -Yeah. -And -- But, eventually,
we came back. And I was still living with
this trepidation that, "Well, this can't possibly
go any better than the other one went." But, so, you have that aside,
and on the other hand, you have Bill Murray
and you think, "Oh, my God,
who can't love Bill Murray?" So I had mixed emotions. And then, the night of the show,
I just felt fantastic. And then that lasted, I guess,
until my feet hit the floor in the morning,
and then the paralytic fear starts all over again. -Yeah, in those early days,
a good show doesn't last particularly long, as far as putting
your fear to bed. -Well, that's right. But I don't know that we were
doing a good show, Bill Murray excepted, but we tried to be
as unusual as possible, because there was nothing else
on TV in those days. It went away right after
Johnny Carson. So then we had this show,
and we tried to make it as unusual as we possibly could,
because we knew, "How many people
are actually watching?" And they said, "Alright,
we'll give you six weeks." So they gave us six weeks,
and at the end of six weeks, they said, "Okay, you can come
back and do six more weeks." So, through the first year,
we were never certain, beyond a month and a half or
two months, if we had a future. And then things started to -- You know, the cement started to
harden a little bit. -Did you have a moment,
then, where you started feeling relaxed with the show and that
you'd be around for a long time? [ Laughter ] -I'm trying to think if I had
one waiting to come out here. I don't know. No, show business is
awful and ugly. How about you? Now you, Mr. Established,
ready to go, "Here I am, thank you very
much," you're in good shape. -Well, I think I obviously
had a different journey. I was terrified when it started,
but I had just finished up a very long run at "SNL," so I did feel I was
comfortable in the building. I, you know --
-And people liked you. People knew you.
-They certainly knew me. -Right.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ] There was name recognition. But it took me a while. I would say it took me
about 18 months. I will say this. I had an interesting journey,
like everybody do in shows over the last two years, of going and
doing the show at home. I think you would have --
Terrible reason. I think you would have
enjoyed doing shows at home. -Yes, you're absolutely right. Now, the one thing
that I still would insist on at home would be makeup. -Uh-huh. -I'm not going to put on
a show without makeup. -Yeah. -But the constraints of that,
you don't look at them as constraints so much
as opportunities. "Here I am at the house.
What can I do?" And, you know, I would go wake
my family up one night, see how that's going. And how long were you at home? -I was at home for almost,
I guess, 9, 10 months. And it was exhilarating,
terrifying, but it was so interesting,
because you have this audience here, and I love
having an audience here. -Now, while you were at home,
was the audience still here? -I did insist on it. And, looking back,
it was a public-health risk, and I apologize for it. -So the audience isolated for
10 months here at the studio. -It was the same audience. We didn't bring in a
different group every night. -Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. You have food and blankets.
You're fine. -But it was --
I felt more connection with the audience at home
than I ever had before, because there was
nobody else out there. -Right.
And was there an intimacy that developed that heretofore
had not existed? -It was the first time
that I understood a thing that I should have understood
from watching your show, which is, the people
that watch your show tend to watch it every night, and so you can sort of
lay in recurring bits. You can make
a callback joke to something. On Thursday,
you can call back Monday with the sense that they
probably were there with you. And that became a nice, intimate
connection that time. -Yeah. -You mentioned you would
wake up your family. One of the things that I first
remember about your show, your mom became a player
on your show. How did you first think that
she would be a fun character to bring on television? -Well, first of all,
this is exciting, because in her life, in my life, no one has ever described
my mom as a player. So thank you for that. That's great!
[ Cheers and applause ] I was driving to work one day,
in the old days, and Howard Stern
was talking to his mother. -Mm-hmm. -And I kind of put the pieces
together and thought, "I have a mother." And it was because of Howard. Then we started putting
my mother on the show. And people -- She became so
popular because she, in many ways for television,
the perfect mother. Snow-white, beautiful hair,
a lovely woman, and -- But the thing
about my mom -- And everybody would say,
"Oh, we love your mother. We love your mother." And I would say, "Yeah, try
living with her for 18 years." But she was the
textbook definition of taciturn. -Mm-hmm.
-Just "Mom?" A lot of that. So, we decided to send her to
Norway for the Olympics, I think after -- [ Laughter ] -Not to compete. -Oh, no, she was competing.
-She did compete. -Yeah, no.
-She did poorly, if I recall. -She did not medal. We don't say she did poorly. We say she did not medal. No. [ Applause ] So, what I found with mom was, it was like I was doing
a ventriloquist act, because in the question, I would have to supply her
with the answer. And we would get a lot of,
"David?" And people thrived on this
and loved it, and I thought it was a great way
to bring us close together. -Yeah. -I don't know what your life
was with your family, but I felt an estrangement. And I thought this would --
And it did. We, in fact, became closer. But the idea that she was just a
ball of laughs and great fun, eh... I'd like to see
the paperwork on that. But she -- [ Laughs ] She -- And God bless her. She lived to be almost 94. -Wow.
-Yeah, it was amazing. [ Applause ] And as people say sometimes,
"Good for her. She died doing
what she loved -- sleeping." So...
[ Laughter ] We -- I cleared that
with the family. -Oh, that's good.
-Yeah. -That's very wise of you.
That's very wise. -Thank you very much.
-You know the business. Now we're going to go to
commercial. This is very exciting.
We have a clip. -Oh, yeah,
now let me intervene. And I'm sorry. This clip -- And people come on
shows with clips and stuff, and there's never been a clip
produced and shown on a talk show that has impelled
anyone to go see the movie. They just -- It's like
60 minutes for, you know, whatever. Seth and I can chat about you. And this clip is only
representational. -Mm-hmm.
-It's not humorous. It's not funny. It's representational of
the nonsense that we pursued each and every night
when I first started the show, which, by the way, is so much
better now, thanks to you. -Well, I don't know
if I agree with that. And you can make
your own judgment after you watch
this representational clip. -When you work here at NBC, one of the things you do a lot
is ride in elevators. And since a lot of sports
originated from real-life activities,
there is no better sport for this building than,
of course, elevator races. You are not allowed
to ask anyone to hold the elevator
for you. You must ride only on
your assigned elevator. And you must be polite
to all other passengers. -David, the atmosphere down
here is incredibly tense. I'd have to liken it to
the scene at the 18th green of a Masters golf tournament. [ Starting pistol fires ] [ Cheers and applause ] -Some history. -Excuse me just a minute.
Speaking of history -- -Fantastic.
-Apparently, we have a winner. Is this...
-I think it is. [ Cheers and applause ]
Really miss guys like Conan and Letterman on late night.
I’m so used to his CBS show that I forgot he preceded Conan.
Anyone remember the "Thursday Fethtival"? He was on Monday through Thursday originally so Thursday was the special night.
His show was so weird back then. Loved it.
Dave looks like a skinny Santa Claus with that beard.
Yikes Seth looking like Stanley Tucci in the hunger games with that tower hairdo.
Miss Letterman, he's a legend
Class, grace, still funny and sharp as a tack.
Santa Claus mode
Letterman was by far the most improvisational late night talkshow host! Sure there were loose scripts, and a teleprompter. But other than maybe Kimmel, none were as genuine. Started watching him on a small b&w tv with rabbit ears my folks (the early 80's) somehow were cool with letting me have in my room.