Saturday, October 03, 2009

Late Blight with David Letterman

Full disclosure: I used to be a big fan of Late Night with David Letterman (back when that was the name of his show). When I was in high school, I had the Late Night with David Letterman book (which was quite funny); I even had a Late Night with David Letterman hat. I appreciated his humor and his deadpan delivery. But it has now been years and years since I paid much attention to Letterman, and the latest incident just goes to show how little I've been missing.

Letterman has always been a hound when it comes to women. He divorced his first wife around the time his career started taking off; carried on a years-long affair with his head writer and producer; had a baby out of wedlock with another woman amid cooing press coverage; and then put off marrying the mother, whom he'd been bedding down for nearly a quarter of a century, until the kid was six years old. Announcing the marriage on his show, he said, "I had avoided getting married pretty good for, like, 23 years, and I ... secretly felt that men who were married admired me, like I was the last of the real gunslingers." Then there were the salvos from the sewer about Sarah Palin's daughter. So there's no surprise in the revelation -- forced by a would-be blackmailer -- that alongside all this came Letterman's sexual exploitation of female employees.

But what I don't get is: why it is that when he announced on his show that the allegation of sex with his female employees was true...the audience responded with laughter and applause.

3 comments:

  1. "why it is that when he announced on his show that the allegation of sex with his female employees was true...the audience responded with laughter and applause."

    Because they are seals, like those slimy, non-intelligent, clapping herds seen at Marine Land... It is a kind of debonair nihilism that effectively says "oh, well... let's have another martini as we scream downwards into the immoral abyss".

    You will also notice that these seals will laugh at evil jokes (increasingly said by talk show buffoons) about child molestation, bestiality, sodomy and other perversions.

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  2. You will also notice that these seals will laugh at evil jokes (increasingly said by talk show buffoons) about child molestation, bestiality, sodomy and other perversions.

    Puts me in mind of the following from Hilaire Belloc:

    We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

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  3. I'm with you; I was a big Letterman fan in college, and I liked the book too! But now he's just going through the motions, and what sordid motions they are.

    Dan Rather, move over one chair.

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