A year or two after David Letterman moved from NBC to CBS, he did a week of shows from Los Angeles. Each night, he would announce that some big star, like Clint Eastwood, would be delivering the Top Ten list, and each night, Calvert DeForest (who’d had to leave his character name, Larry “Bud” Melman, back at NBC) would march out with the blue card. An on-screen graphic would flash “CLINT EASTWOOD,” or whomever, and Dave would just take the blue card from “Clint” and the show would continue.
Then, on Friday, this happened:
It was actually the second time Johnny’s appeared on the show that week – he was briefly visible in a little pre-taped remote segment that had aired earlier in the week.
Johnny never once appeared with Leno after his retirement.
On a winter night 2005, Letterman came out and gave what might have seemed to the casual viewer a somewhat disjointed monologue. Some of the comic references were months or years old, and an attentive viewer might have recognized that all of them had actually been used in previous Letterman monologues:
I’d read news stories and knew the real story behind the monologue. Dave explained it a few moments later. Every joke in that monologue was written by … Johnny Carson, who had died the previous week. Peter Lassally, one of Carson’s producers, went on to work for Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, after Carson retired. When Carson had the itch to comment on some current event he would write a joke and fax it to Lassally, who would pass it along to Dave. Dave, who knows a good thing when he sees it, eagerly received and used the jokes. Lassally revealed this publicly only a few days before Carson’s death.
Letterman collected some of those Johnny-written jokes and made an entire monologue out of them for his first show after Carson’s death.
By the way, one of the things Lassally’s done since working for Worldwide Pants is convince Dave and CBS to install Craig Ferguson as host of the show which follows Dave’s (and which is controlled by Worldwide Pants). I think he is still Ferguson’s executive producer.
Dave’s week of shows from L.A. came from a time when he, Leno and Conan would occasionally take their shows on the road, renting a theater or TV studio on the opposite coast from their usual digs, or in Chicago. In spite of the change of venue, they usually did nothing more than an amped-up version of their normal show.
The old model of taking your show on the road has since been decried by Letterman and others as too expensive and too much trouble. But Ferguson did something unique, different and highly entertaining with last week’s trip to Paris. “Le Late Late Show Avec Craig Ferguson” was not shot in a studio or a theater but on the streets of Paris. The interview segments were done at a card table in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. The show was goofy, inventive and thoroughly watchable. Ferguson’s robot skeleton sidekick, Geoff, and one of his signature guests, Kristen Bell, were on hand every night as well.
I think Johnny would have been proud.