Age of the Geek

By: 
Travis Fischer

A Last Top Ten For David Letterman
  
     It's the end of another era. Last week David Letterman, the true successor to Johnny Carson, hosted his final episode of The Late Show.
     I never watched his work on "Late Night with David Letterman," but his move to CBS in 1993 eventually became part of my nightly ritual. My parents allowed me a television in my room at a pretty young age. For a life long night owl like me, that ultimately resulted in me watching the 10 o'clock news on KIMT, followed by Letterman's antics, just when I was hitting the age that I could start to appreciate the jokes.
     So now, in honor of Dave, here's the Top Ten List of things I learned watching "The Late Show with David Letterman."
 
     10. New York City is an actual place with actual people.
     Before Letterman, my primary exposure to the idea of New York City was Ninja Turtle cartoons and police procedurals, most of which are actually filmed in Los Angeles or Toronto.
     But on The Late Show, Dave introduced me to a perspective of the city you'd never see in a movie or a television show. Just around the corner from the Ed Sullivan Theater is Rupert Gee's Hello Deli, an otherwise ordinary deli made famous by Dave getting its owner to do wacky things around town.
     It was part of Dave's genius. World famous celebrities may have come from all over the world to appear on Dave's show, but he spent just as much time interacting with the average person on the street and showing what daily life in the city is actually like. At least, what it's like when your business is next door to a wacky talk show host.
 
     9. The Foo Fighters, when not playing Dave's favorite song, spend their spare time vigilantly fighting foo.
 
     8. Television lies.
     The Late Show, as its name implies, is on late. 10:30 at night. So imagine my surprise the first time I saw Dave take a camera crew outside to the streets of New York and it was daylight. As it turns out, The Late Show wasn't shown live to anybody but its studio audience.
     I'm sure this wasn't a surprise to its intended audience, but to a ten-year-old kid staying up too late it was something of a revelation.
 
     7. Don't get on Alan Kalter's bad side.
     Just don't do it. It's not a good idea.
 
     6. Letterman Invented YouTube.
     Okay, this is cheating, but when you think about it, everything popular on YouTube today can be traced back to Letterman. Animals doing tricks, pranks on people, comedy in list form. Before there was YouTube, there was Dave.
 
     5. Letterman is the true successor to Johnny Carson.
     Even as a ten year old I had better taste in comedy than Leno viewers.
 
     4. Talent trumps image.
     Even a production company named Worldwide Pants can command great honor and respect if it does its job well enough.
 
     3. Happy Birthday, Dave.
     On April 12, 1995, Drew Barrymore taught me that there are fewer things you can't do on television than I had previously thought.
 
     2. The world is great.
     Remember the Clinton Administration? I do. Mostly because of the Late Show.
     Long before Jon Stewart became my go-to source for political news with a dash of comedy, I watched the Lewinski Scandal unfold through Letterman's nightly monologue.
     Imagine growing up in a world where the worst thing a President could do was cheat on his wife. That Congress was so bored they turned a private indiscretion into a national affair and impeachment hearings.
     Of course then George W. Bush almost got elected, ended up President anyway, and I found out exactly how bad things could actually get, but by that time I had stopped regularly watching Letterman.          
 
     1. The top item on the Top Ten list is never funny.
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and can't wait for Colbert to come back.
 

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