NOT A HAPPY PUMPKIN

Mixed Media

David Letterman has good reason to be so grouchy: late-night TV's new alternatives

JAMES WOLCOTT

Night owls may be a solitary breed, in TV terms a marginal audience. Yet they've become a tip-top demographic target to network programmers. After midnight beI longs to baby-boomers and their boom-boom offspring, who have money to spend and attitude to bum. (Feeble old Gus the fire chief will have to fend for himself.) Prime-time shows may have heavier market shares, but it's the hip hard core who set the up-tempo in pop culture. They're a buried transmitter within TV's mushy mass.

For over six years the grinning pumpkin head on the graveyard shift has been David Letterman, star of NBC's Late Night. He's not a happy pumpkin, however—fuming has melted his frost. Which perhaps shouldn't be a surprise. Comedians from Chaplin to Red Skelton to Jerry Lewis may have worn the white paint of Pagliacci, anointing the circus sawdust with tears of pathos, but the Pagliacci clown (laughing on the outside, crying on the inside) is a sentimental con. Off-duty, comedians are less likely to shed pristine tears than to spit rusty nails. Comics thrive on thwartedness; they saute grievances in their own stomach acid. And Letterman has had a lot eating him. His beloved dog Bob died. He and his longtime girlfriend, Merrill Markoe, reportedly split. (She wrote a rather cool eulogy on Bob in New York Woman without once mentioning Bob's co-owner.) He caught a cold and whined about it for a week on the air.

Even so, Peter W. Kaplan seemed taken aback by the intensity of Letterman's grumpiness when he interviewed Late Night's host for Rolling Stone's special comedy issue last November. He found his hero bug-eyed and blustery, a sullen Samson beset by Philistines. "David Letterman is pounding the floor of his office in the RCA Building with a baseball bat. Bam. 'It's just bullshit!' he keeps saying. Bam." Just what is, Dave? What doth make thee mad? " 'Come on!' he says, his voice rising in genuine outrage. 'Let's not be so readily entertained! Give it up! I think we're about to bring down the curtain on this society, and it's television that's doing it.' Bam!" Letterman's tirade was big on sound effects, short on specifics. The best for-instance he could offer on how abysmal TV has become was the nonstop sight of beefy men in teeny trunks. "Why can you turn on the television any time of the day or night and find pro wrestling? How come? Tell me!" The true Philistines, then, are us. We, the American people, fed to the gills with a junk diet of pro wrestling and fat from unknowing. . . philistines with a small p. Using his baseball bat as a jawbone, Letterman wished to smite us into sensibility of our fallen state.

Or at least that's the number he ran by Rolling Stone. But just because they bought it, why should we? Letterman ought to scrutinize his own slumming. Is the sight of him tossing waffles to his audience or mocking a toupeed "telepsychic" a more elevating spectacle than a bunch of evolutionary throwbacks on steroids body-slamming the mat? It isn't that Letterman's wrong about TV's coarsening effects, its endless, mindless tides of sludge and sleaze. It's that Letterman himself isn't an antidote to this moron spill, nor does he try to be. On Late Night he doesn't come across as politically riled and rectifying, but as personally peeved and professionally put out. He's a pickle puss who seems to resent no-name guests taking up his time, as if he had something better to do. Yet it isn't clear what that something better might be, since he's never beamed the slightest particle of interest in music, dance, travel, politics, literature, or even movies. Certainly his preparation for interviews is laughable. His research seems to consist of whatever sheet of info his staff has managed to shove under his nose. Letterman has a deep-seated resistance to doing his homework. Oh, Ma, do l gotta?

His off-camera and sometimes oncamera apparel (floppy sweatshirt, baseball cap, high-top sneakers) matches his mental attitude: collegiate. And not just collegiate but undergraduate. Intellectually, he's never left the dorm—he's still playing hall hockey with a rolled-up pair of socks. If Letterman truly wanted to smite the hydra-headed parasite draining American strength, he might steal a page from Steve Allen, who staged stunts as wild as Letterman's (arming an entire audience for a massive pie fight), yet managed to keep up serious interests. With his glasses and raucous laugh, Allen was a jazzy bookworm. Words were his notes. Letterman, a true child of TV (before hosting his own shows, he worked as a TV weatherman and gameshow contestant), scorns television's thin, shrill hype but answers to no deeper call. His greatest fear is dead air.

Dead air is what Late Night exhaled during last year's writers' strike. Not only isn't Letterman a Man with a Mission, he isn't much of a trouper, as his strike stint showed. Where Johnny Carson (whose writers were also walking a picket line) winged it as best he could for a couple of weeks, Letterman eyeballed the clock, leaning across his desk at regular dull intervals to inform his bandleader, Paul Shaffer, of how much time they had left in comedy limbo. "Only fifty-two minutes to go, Paul." Then we're outta here. Although Late Night had been in reruns for months, Letterman treated his return to the airwaves like a draft notice—he seemed to resent being recalled to active duty. The only flash of spontaneity came when the sex-babe comedienne Sandra Bernhard, after her usual twatting around with skittish Dave, brought on her material pal, Madonna. The audience freaked. Identically dressed, Bernhard and Madonna cut up like a couple of June bugs and made inside cracks about lesbian bars. Kaplan credits Letterman with the Madonna coup, but it was Bernhard who made it an event, not Big Dave, who seemed miffed at having another hand on the steering wheel. C'mon, kids, let Daddy drive. Kaplan: "At the highest tension point, he reached unconsciously for a huge cigar—pulling the camera back to himself and regaining control of his show."

As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but you'd have to be pretty naive to believe that Letterman's gesture was unconscious. By drawing out "a huge cigar," he was both upstaging his female guests and re-establishing his male prerogative. Like his baseball bat, Letterman's cigar is symbolic to the point of self-parody. It's his way of saying that he's all guy. He seems most simpatico when he's horsing around with radio humorist Howard Stern, who vulgarizes everything. Together, they can share guy talk. Women on the show are usually reminded, sometimes gently. sometimes not, that they're not welcome in Dave's clubhouse. Women are showgirl-ornamental—''fabulous babes.''

Every now and then a raw patch of skin peels off with Letterman's makeup. On one show, describing an epic bout of insomnia, the writer-actor Buck Henry said, "You move from a general selfloathing to a hatred of everyone else." To which Letterman jokily replied, "I know that feeling, and I get plenty of sleep." For a misanthrope, he does look well rested. Perhaps what will stop Letterman from playing possum is not a ground tremor but a simple dose of competition. Two new late-night talk shows, hosted by Pat Sajak and Arsenio Hall, are debuting early this year. The Sajak show doesn't threaten to be a speed pill. How the host of Wheel of Fortune will fare without Vanna to turn the letters appears iffy. Hall, however, might loosen Letterman's hold on late night. As Eddie Murphy's main man demonstrated on his short-lived Fox series (he followed the Joan Rivers debacle), he is capable of energizing a young black viewership that the networks have left almost totally untapped. Just look at the Letterman show, for example—one can hardly imagine a whiter slice of Wonder bread.

In the meantime, there's no denying that Late Night with David Letterman has never been more avidly monitored. It's infiltrated our daily discourse. The often brilliant Top Ten lists have become a comedy institution. Now that ridicule has become an almost overriding force in politics and no one wants to appear pontifical, the Top Ten lists have become the tip sheet to the Zeitgeist, the proper take. Political pundits such as Chris Matthews (author of Hardball) appear on talk shows armed with their own wise-guy one-liners. Even sportscasters aren't immune. In a recent memoir, NBC's Ahmad Rashad describes how he advised colleague Bob Costas to softpedal the Lettermanish sarcasm in his commentary. Unlike Rashad, a former footballer with the Minnesota Vikings, Costas was a civilian in the sphere of pro sport: jocks, Rashad warned him, jocks don't cotton to cute spitballs coming from someone who hasn't warred in the trenches. He may have been aiming his sallies higher than Rashad knew, because Costas now has his own NBC talk show following Late Night, called Later. He's earned his Letterman sweater.

Compared with Late Night, the Later show is listenable and polite. The set is a quiet, cozy den, where the guest sits in a chair facing Costas for a full half-hour. Costas can't afford to coast. With no studio audience to play to and no sidekick to play off of, he has to pilot these informal sessions solo. If the conversation lags, there's no place he can turn for a bailout. (Whereas Letterman can always get director Hal Gurney to punch up some goofy graphic on the screen.) Costas is skilled at taking the onus off of an uncomfortable question. At his most amiably smooth and nondescript he rests atop the conversation like cream on cappuccino. Only there ain't much cappuccino. Considering the fringe time he's on, it's dispiriting how few chances he takes—how often he settles for show-biz so-so. In bygone days Dick Cavett used to interview Eudora, Welty and John Cheever. When I've watched Later, Costas has been closeted with David Brenner, Billy Crystal, and Night Court's Harry Anderson. Like Letterman, he can't get off the celebrity fun wagon. As long as Letterman provides the lead-in, Later may maintain its insomniac niche. So far it has no rationale or inner necessity of its own, save to provide Bob Costas a place to park his sweater.

It's the approach of postmodernists from David Letterman to David Byrne, putting ironic quotation marks around stupid so that "stupid" becomes smart.

One cable network has demonstrated that it can diaper the baby-boomers without even mounting a talk show. It's found a new way to lure Lettermaniacs. The network is Nickelodeon. By day Nickelodeon caters to the sandbox set with cartoons and reruns of Lassie and Dennis the Menace. By night Nickelodeon becomes "Nick at Nite," a snack pack of famous and forgotten sitcoms. Other cable outfits offer sitcoms— Nick's novelty is in the packaging. Nick at Nite's witty promos are parodistic state of the art. The Donna Reed Show, a squeaky-clean salute to suburban, pearlstrung Mom, is said to contain subliminal messages such as Drink Your Milk and Make Your Bed. My Three Sons is touted as a dark journey into the pressurized psyche of Fred MacMurray. An ad for the talking horse Mr. Ed offers a quiz which reveals that Mr. Ed's stunts were performed by Dirty Dancing star Patrick Swayze. (Cut to blurry shot of Swayze's head superimposed over Mr. Ed's.) Another ad discloses Mr. Ed's own dark secret: "I wish I had been born a woman." The announcer then intones, "A/r. Ed—it's not just for kids anymore."

There's some truth to this tomfoolery: for adults, Mr. Ed can be a genuinely strange trip. One episode stars Mae West, panting beneath a mountain of face powder; another features the wonderful surrealistic moment when Alan Young's Wilbur, walking along the beach, sights Mr. Ed through his binoculars—riding a surfboard! And who could ever forget Mr. Ed sliding into home at Dodger Stadium? I can't, but then, I have no life. Because of Nickelodeon's push, Mr. Ed has acquired newfound cult status. After the Olympic equestrian events, a local New York sportscaster complained, "Mr. Ed never won an Emmy, and they're giving a gold medal to a horse?"

By repackaging the sitcoms as camp artifacts, by recontextualizing them, if I may use a lit-crit mouthful, Nick at Nite has rinsed old pennies new. It's the approach of postmodernists from David Letterman to David Byrne, putting ironic quotation marks around stupid so that "stupid" becomes smart. Kitsch is king—yesterday's dumb obvious is today's pop sublime. It's only a matter of time before Farrah Fawcett bath mats take their rightful place in the pantheon next to the black velvet paintings of Elvis. Nick at Nite taps into the baby-boomers' desire to reattach themselves to the shiny breast that gave them suck and feel superior in the process. Nick's strategy isn't foolproof. No amount of clever bluff can camouflage the sheer lard loaded into the scripts and costumes of the old Ann Sothem series Susie, or colorize the dated psychedelia of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, but in its lineup of schlock, Nick at Nite has made one remarkable find: Car 54, Where Are You? A fondly remembered curio among couch potatoes since its cancellation in 1963, Car 54 is about a Mutt and Jeff pair of cops: Gunther Toody (Joe E. Ross), froggy, squat, and excitable, and Francis Muldoon (Fred Gwynne), horsey, tall, and sanguine. The series is a lumpy frieze of familiar faces. Fred Gwynne later grew neck bolts as Herman Munster, and A1 Lewis (here a flatfoot named Schnauser) joined him as Grandpa Munster. Even the bit parts induce tiny shocks of recognition. The sports commentator Heywood Hale Broun briefly appears in a hilarious episode about Toody's attempt to teach a parrot to talk. Like Sgt. Bilko (both shows were created by Nat Hiken), Car 54 is a barracks comedy, with lots of fast byplay, bellyaching, and ambivalent male bonding. (When Muldoon brings a tall brunette to a party, Toody exclaims, "Hey, not bad!") The scripts hold up terrifically. In one Car 54 a wildfire rumor leads the men of the 53rd Precinct to fear that their new captain is a sado-Fascist. "They're bringing in a Nazi general? A Nazi general?" Schnauser cries incredulously. The marital spats bring out the rolling pin. Toody's wife, Lucille, complains that he no longer pays attention to her. "What color is my hair, Gunther? What color is that hair you love so much?" "It's kinda hard to describe," says Gunther, "but it's the color a basketball gets in the last half of the third quarter." And Toody's dream of singing tenor in the precinct's barbershop quartet has him pouring out his grief in a fantasy sequence, dressed as Pagliacci. I wish I could tie this into my opening section, ingeniously rethreading the Pagliacci theme, but it's just one of those fluky things.

Even with its nifty promos, Nickelodeon can't keep spinning the same wheels indefinitely. And the shelves for old product need restocking. Maybe it's time for a Love, American Style revival, as my friend Elvis Mitchell suggests. All those retro swinging singles' bell-bottoms, vests, sideburns, Afros, and sticky eyelashes. All that clunky furniture. Dick Gautier! Arlene Golonka! Jo Anne Worley! One can even foresee a future in which Letterman's Late Night is chopped up into half-hour repeats and presented as wacky archives from the Reagan era, just as the condensed Saturday Night Live on Nick at Nite represents Ford-Carter. On an endless loop we will be able to see Letterman lowered into water in his suit of Alka-Seltzer, abusing the Today-show crew with his bullhorn (thus precipitating his feud with Bryant Gumbel), being called an ass-bleep by Cher. Fred Allen called radio the "treadmill to oblivion." TV is a treadmill to perpetuity. David Letterman couldn't get off even if he tried. He might as well quit bitching and learn to enjoy the ride.