Ken Tucker

Since his subsequent move to CBS, Letterman hasn’t beaten Leno since 1995, when Hugh Grant, fresh from a prostitution bust, gave Leno the exclusive interview that, for reasons that still beggar the imagination, put Leno’s ever-increasingly dumbed-down, carny-show version of “The Tonight Show” on top of the late-night ratings heap and have kept it there ever since. Then there was the 1995 Oscar fiasco, when Letterman’s hosting strategy — a disastrous blend of New York-style lordliness and a misguided faith in the silly-absurd (“Oprah, meet Uma; Uma, meet Oprah …”) — left most of the Hollywood audience, accustomed to a night of un-ironic stroking, glaring grimly and unamused. Add to this the fact that “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and Letterman’s own new follow-up act, “The Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn,” trade on youth-cult references that frequently make “The Late Show With David Letterman” seem more like the Rest Home Where Bart Simpson’s Grandfather Lives, and you’ve got yourself one aborted show-business trajectory. Anyone for clicking on “Stalled Careers”?

But what I’ve sketched out above is merely the conventional wisdom on David Letterman, the interpretation put forth nowadays by most TV critics, industry observers and more than a few Leno fans. This is the view of Letterman from those who’ve stopped watching him; who are perennially more interested in following whoever’s getting the most media ink or attracting the biggest ratings; who, indeed, didn’t cotton to Letterman’s ironic take on the talk-show role in the first place. I propose an alternative reality to everything stated above — namely, that David Letterman is, right now, as funny as he’s ever been (ratings be damned); that he is certainly the most important talk-show host of his era and arguably second only to Johnny Carson as the best of all time (more on Steve Allen and Jack Paar in a bit); and that Letterman — and I’m convinced you can date this from the moment he flicked his contact lenses in the garbage can about 18 months ago and started wearing those little wire-rimmed glasses — has jettisoned the dulled weapon of irony and is currently engaged in a kind of comedic guerrilla warfare that, if you were to pencil in a goatee on his face to complement those tiny spectacles, would render him the Leon Trotsky of Talk Shows: The Last Late-Night Revolutionary.

He is, of course, a highly unlikely anarchist. Born in on April 12, 1947, Indianapolis, to parents Joseph (a florist) and Dorothy (a homemaker), Letterman and his two sisters (one older, one younger) led the Midwestern idyll that breeds either contentment or wackiness, and in Dave’s case, wacky won out. This, despite the fact, as he once told Maureen Dowd, “My mother, bless her heart, was the least demonstrative person God ever breathed life into.” (Watching Dorothy over the years playing prim straight woman to many of Dave’s stunts, including sending her to the Olympics as a correspondent, you have no trouble believing she is one cool customer. Gee, do you think this had any effect on the formation of Dave’s own renowned reserve?) Letterman majored in semi-pro fooling around at Ball State University in Muncie (1965-70), hamming it up as a communications major on the campus radio station and on local TV. During his college years he also found time to marry, at age 21, fellow student Michelle Cook. The union collapsed in 1977 after the pair moved to Los Angeles, and Letterman has always taken the full blame: He was immature, too consumed with jump-starting his career. It’s the real-life version of what Carter described in “The Late Shift” as Letterman’s “penchant for self-denigration, no matter what was going on in his career.”

Letterman was born early enough to appreciate a folksy radio host like Arthur Godfrey, an early hero, and he thoroughly absorbed the deconstructive self-consciousness that Steve Allen brought to his reign over “The Tonight Show” from 1954-57. (Where Allen once covered himself in tea bags and had himself dunked into a cup of hot water, Letterman would later bedeck himself with Alka Selzer tablets and lower himself into a giant glass of water for some fizzy fun.) Talk shows were always Letterman’s goal. To break in, he went the Hollywood comedy-club route with moderate success; the consensus seems to be that he had cutting jokes and thinly veiled contempt for two-drink-minimum bozos — not the sort of recipe for a contented stand-up.

But, he once said in a rare flash of candid careerism, “You just use the clubs as a steppingstone.” He put in his time in TV hell — appearances on “The Gong Show” and “The $20,000 Pyramid”; a little stiff singing and dancing on Mary Tyler Moore’s ill-fated 1978 variety show “Mary”; a guest role in a 1979 “Mork and Mindy” that actually required him to approximate acting. All the while, he was plotting his own talk style. He had little use for the naked emotionalism of the other great host of his childhood, Jack Paar (who “Tonight”-ed with wracked sobs from 1957-62); no, Dave wanted to be like his Midwestern-born idol, Johnny Carson, who since taking over in ’62 had turned “The Tonight Show” into a well-oiled (and sometimes excessively oily) machine gleamingly efficient at both star-coddling and star-grooming. To do stand-up for King Carson was to be anointed a punch-line prince, and Letterman received the blessing after a sharp set in November 1978. Even then — no mere John Byner, he — Letterman was giving off the right vibes, and he ended up guest-hosting for Johnny 20 times before NBC said, Give this smart-aleck his own show.

Unfortunately for Letterman, that show was in the morning, a time of day when viewers were unaccustomed to countenancing the sort of amiably ramshackle, anything-can-happen show Letterman devised; people were confused by a semi-regular guest, housewife Mrs. Marv Mendenhall, who was actually an amusingly prissy character played by actress Edie McClurg. “The David Letterman Show” premiered in June 1980 and was canceled in October. NBC and Carson, a strong ally, kept the comedian on retainer until 1982, when, on Feb. 1, “Late Night With David Letterman” premiered, slotted after “The Tonight Show.”

This was, in the memories of many, Dave’s golden era, with characters like portly dumb-dumb Larry “Bud” Melman, show writer Chris Elliott’s “Man Under the Seats” and a vertiginous episode broadcast upside down. Working with a shrewd, cutting writing team that included then-girlfriend Merrill Markoe, Gerard Mulligan, Matt Wickline, Steve O’Donnell, Randy Cohen, Jim Downey and Tom Gammil, Letterman was doing the most innovative, ironic comedy on the air. Some guests have always responded avidly to Letterman’s blithe contempt for show-business obeisance, recognizing in his irreverence an opportunity to snub it themselves: Personalities as various as Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Paul Newman, Alec Baldwin, Bonnie Hunt, Kevin Kline, Drew Barrymore, Matthew Broderick and Tony Randall have all proven delightful company, game for anything Dave wants to throw at them and often giving him more than he bargained for. (Insert your own Drew-showing-him-her-boobies joke here.) Others have taken offense at his refusal to play the chattering flatterer (Cher), or taken the offensive to fend off his sarcasm (Madonna’s expletive-filled appearance).

“Hey, I’m no armchair historian,” Scott Dikkers, editor of the Onion, recently told the New Yorker, “but it was Letterman who made the world a sarcastic place. Because of Letterman, everybody I know is sarcastic all the time, in everything they say — never genuine.” This remark gets to the heart of Letterman’s legacy and his present-day dilemma. The sarcasm Dikkers speaks of, the pervasive irony that informed every second of Letterman’s NBC show, was so influential throughout television and pop culture in general that it has, by now, exhausted itself. And at times, it’s seemed to have exhausted Letterman himself.

“We know the show is tired; it’s the same crap night after night,” Dave fairly roared one evening this past September, sitting at his desk. “But here’s the thing,” he said, turning to the camera with a grin whose twitchiness slid somewhere between arch playfulness and suicidal self-contempt: “We just don’t care.” Seven months later, on a balmy April night, Letterman sauntered out onto the stage of the Ed Sullivan Theater, waved away the cheers, took his limbering-up, touching-his-loafers bow and said, “I’m Dave Letterman, I’m the host of ‘The Late Show,’ and you think you’ve got a rotten job.” The sense that Letterman genuinely believes he has — that is to say, does — a rotten job has been evident in the past: usually whenever he’s not talking about how miserable he is, when he’s smiling gap-toothily and throwing himself into comedy bits with zesty enthusiasm. Letterman invariably signals his disenchantment by feigning a chipperness so awkwardly that it is instantly perceived as false.

At his truest, he is a worrier, a fretful perfectionist and the most neurotically modest Manhattan person-of-note since New Yorker editor William Shawn. (He shuns interviews, parties, even off-camera palaver with celebrities — his commercial-break frostiness was lifted brilliantly by Garry Shandling on “The Larry Sanders Show” as one of Larry’s salient traits. At the same time, Letterman is a generous donor to charitable causes, loves dogs and cars, likes kids and audience members who don’t live in Manhattan or Los Angeles and was notably humane to Margaret Ray, the woman who stalked him for years, right up to her suicide in October 1998.)

But it’s when the quality of Letterman’s show is high, as it has been over the past year or so, that he feels freest to indulge his favorite comic persona: that of the cranky misanthrope, the whining complainer, the middle-aged, Midwestern goofball who likes to use the power his show has to promote big-name guests to, instead, cut those stars down to size. Letterman still will brook no pretensions or banal product plugging — when you come on Dave’s show, you’d better have a few choice anecdotes that don’t have to do with your current movie project, lest the host end your segment with a quick cut to a commercial. But he resorts less and less to the bullying and cajoling that used to characterize his interviewing style. Over the past year, he’s shown more of an interest in engaging guests in serious discussion (New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani seemed caught off-guard when Letterman pressed him on police brutality recently), yet without going all Charlie Rose on us.

Once again, Letterman is going against the prevailing style. Let Kilborn, O’Brien and Jon Stewart (“The Daily Show”) continue to strip-mine irony ore; except for the often exhilaratingly loony O’Brien, their styles already seem tired. Letterman, by contrast, currently seems more comfortable in his own leathery skin, and — even as he continues to sink in the ratings — his show is all the better for it. With the irony burned off, his comedy now breathes fresh oxygen; he’s getting big laughs by doing things like revitalizing old forms, such as an entire monologue consisting of “It was so hot today” gags (“It was so hot today, the rats at Dunkin’ Donuts moved over to Ben & Jerry’s” — badda-boom! rim-shoots Paul Shaffer and the band, Vegas-style.) I warn you: Years from now, when Dave has retired to Indianapolis to jog 10 miles a day and wave the first-race flag for the opening of the Indianapolis 500, you’ll all be moaning about what a loss he is to television, just like all those weepy keepers of the Carson flame. For a guy whose current favorite catch phrase is “I wouldn’t give your troubles to a monkey on a rock,” Letterman is one monkey who’d turn into your favorite uncle if you gave him half a chance.

Kael has been providing revelation, scorn, ecstasy and H-E-L-P for the movies for so long, it’s hard to believe that she was in her 40s when she loosed these early salvos. Unlike any movie critic of the present era, Kael did not pursue her career while still a cinema-soaked whelp. Born in Petaluma, Calif., on June 19, 1919, she is the daughter of Polish immigrants who moved to San Francisco during the Depression; Kael attended UC-Berkeley as a philosophy major. Married and divorced three times, the mother of a daughter, Gina (born in 1948), Kael spent her early adulthood working at jobs ranging from cook to ad copywriter, seamstress to bookstore clerk.

She ran the Berkeley Cinema Guild and Studio from 1955 to 1960, and began writing meticulously detailed and opinionated programs for the films she was choosing. According to an invaluable profile by Mark Feeney in the Boston Globe Magazine in 1989, Kael published her first review in a small journal in 1953, and thereafter wrote freelance pieces for periodicals as various as the Massachusetts Review, Kulcher and Sight and Sound. Her brief stint at McCall’s is part of movie-critic lore, since she was supposedly fired for panning the immensely popular “The Sound of Music.” (“We have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs”; Celine Dion should get down on her knees every night and thank Jim Cameron that Kael isn’t still reviewing regularly.)

Kael was hired at the New Yorker by editor William Shawn in 1967. There, given the space to turn her conversational cadences into big, sculpted, kinetic essays (Calder mobiles of prose, without the gewgaw sentimentality), Kael came into her own. Her credo: “The reader is in on my thought processes.” The enemy? “Saphead objectivity.” She delighted and infuriated New Yorker readers with long, reasoned (or sometimes intentionally delirious, unreasoned) rhapsodies over movies her readership would never deign to go see (“Used Cars,” “Dreamscape,” “Songwriter”), issued pronouncements no other movie critic would agree with (her famous claim that the 1972 premiere of “Last Tango in Paris” is a “date that should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May, 29, 1913, the night ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’ was first performed, in music history”) and denounced highly praised films like the Oscar-winning “Coming Home” (“extremely naive, and possibly disingenuous”) with the serene authority of a genius autodidact. While covering movies, she also managed to work in her knowledge and passion for everything from Henry James to ballet to TV sitcoms, and without any self-consciousness or warning would drop in bits of autobiography or various insights regarding her own hard-earned wisdom about the battle between the sexes.

Fans have their favorite Kael pieces — her 1963 gutting of the auteur theory, “Circles and Squares”; her acutely nuanced 1975 profile of Cary Grant; her devastating 1980 polemic “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers.” (My own choice would be “Fear of Movies,” her 1978 polemic castigating both timid movies and timid moviegoers: “There’s something repressive in the atmosphere. [People] are rejecting the rare films that could stir them, frighten them, elate them.” “Audiences hiss at the sight of blood now,” she wrote, “as if they didn’t have it in their own bodies.”)

Foes, too, had their own favorite Kael pieces. She was mocked as being ignorant of moviemaking when she suggested that “Citizen Kane” was as much the creation of its scenarist, Herman J. Mankiewicz, as it was of its director-star, Orson Welles. In 1980, Renata Adler, in the New York Review of Books, characterized her collection “When the Lights Go Down” as being “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” Read now, Adler’s diatribe — referring to Kael’s work as “nearly out of control,” a series of “denouncings, exhortations, code words, excommunications, programs, threats” — is a list of what any passionate moviegoer should, in 1999, actually want more of in criticism.

So there were stop signs, roadblocks and big bad wolves along the way. In 1979, she succumbed to the beguilement of Warren Beatty and accepted a position as an “executive consultant” for Paramount, which lasted only five months. As the years went by, Kael’s health has grown weaker — as “Rushmore” director Wes Anderson recently revealed in a putatively affectionate but peculiarly heartless piece in the New York Times, Kael suffers from Parkinson’s disease — and she has written little over the last decade.

Nevertheless, Kael’s influence is everywhere and lasting, and not just in the prose styles of enough movie-critic thieves to fill a small apartment building (call it the Paulette Arms). When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes, as she did this past January, of President Clinton’s “entertaining display of schiziness,” she is deploying a Kael neologism, whether she realizes it or not. Her finest adepts are critics who have borrowed not her self-created slang and rhetoric — the so-called “Paulettes” — but who have developed a stubborn independence of opinion and an original manner of expressing it. Here I am thinking not even of movie critics, but of writers as disparate as Dave Hickey, Mim Udovich and Tom Carson. (Carson has been writing tough, funny TV reviews for the Village Voice for years, but suddenly people are talking about his deft eviscerations of, say, news anchors because he’s now also writing for Esquire. Like the New Yorker for Kael, establishment publications confer weight on critics’ judgments — it ain’t fair, but it’s true.)

My paperback copy of Kael’s first collection, “I Lost It at the Movies,” carries a line of breathless ad copy: “A savagely written book by America’s most controversial movie critic!” Can you imagine a contemporary movie critic who could inspire such overripeness? “A slashingly written book by America’s most dull-blade film critic, Lawrence Van Gelder!” “A brutal thumb’s-up by America’s most thumb-uppable movie critic, Roger Ebert!” Film criticism in the present day is dominated by careerists whose primary frames of reference are other examples of their chosen art plus the desired opinions, real or imagined, of their editors.

Certainly pride in — or simply the privilege of — the sort of critical independence Kael maintains is increasingly rare. The film critic for a New York tabloid was asked last year to remove the foreign films from her 10 best list; when she balked, the titles were pushed to the bottom, so as, one supposes the editor imagined, to avoid making readers uncomfortable about encountering the unfamiliar — a crucial duty of a good critic.

And when they’re not being sold out by their bosses, critics can just as often sell themselves out. In a recent interview, Stephen Schiff — former Boston Phoenix Paulette, New Yorker critic-at-large and recent “Lolita” screenwriter — was quoted as saying of his new industry friends and his old movie criticism, “I just hope everyone is willing to forgive and forget, but mainly not even notice that I was around.” Reading this, a friend suggested that someone should immediately issue a Schiff collection of movie reviews called “Kiss Kiss Ass Ass,” but, in keeping with what Kael has called the “sexually tinged titles” of her own collections, I suggested a vanity-press chapbook titled “Turned Out.”

Kael — diminutive (a mere 5 feet tall!), adroit, cussing and cussed — has maintained the right attitude for a generation. “Not many reviewers have a real gift for effrontery,” she once told an interviewer. “I think that may be my best talent.” Oh, how I and so many others wish we could read her thoughts on “Happiness” or “The Thin Red Line” or “Affliction” or “The Waterboy.” (A guess: She likes Adam Sandler more than Todd Solandz — wanna bet?)

Personal disclosure: I met her once, in 1980. She had just reviewed “Honeysuckle Rose” and quoted a description I had written of Willie Nelson’s music. Upon being introduced, I told her how flattered I was. She squeezed my hand in both of hers and said, “I thought you would be, dear.” Kael is the only writer about whom I can say that being condescended to by her felt like an honor.