Remembering David Letterman: The Early Stand-Up Years

In 1976 I was at a crossroads in my life. I was a smart kid but more than a bit of a screw-up. I didn't much like school and growing up in Southern Indiana, my knowledge of the ways of show business consisted of what I could glean from watching the "Tonight Show" and reading copies of Daily Variety at the public library.

But even without being conscious of the decision, I somehow convinced myself that I should go to college in California. More specifically, UCLA and that fall I headed out West to become another soulless political science major. But that dream only lasted until I discovered the Comedy Store in Hollywood, where I fell into a scene that turned out to be a pivotal time in stand-up comedy. I spent nearly every night at the club, watching performers from the back of the room or hanging at upstairs at the smaller Belly Room space. There were open mike slots and the chance to join in on Improv nights where you could find yourself thrown into a scene opposite Robin Williams or John Ritter. I'm not sure calling it a "magical" time is quite accurate, but I'm pretty sure there haven't been many times when you could see so much undiscovered comedic talent crammed into one small, dark and poorly ventilated space.

There were a lot of comics I admired, but the one that I always made sure to watch was a guy named David Letterman. The first time I saw him he was a lanky, awkward Midwesterner with a beard and this weird lumberjack shirt. He wasn't a natural comic and in fact his performance style vacillated between uncomfortable and embarrassed. I saw him a number of times over a couple of years as his style changed and he began to get some acting or writing work. He cleaned up his onstage look and evolved to the point where he appeared to be reasonably comfortable in his own skin. He also became funnier, although looking back I realize that the jokes weren't necessarily any better. What changed was his ability to connect with an audience. The crowd wanted to like him and if they were willing to listen, they would follow him almost anywhere.

But there are times in any comedy club when the audience isn't in a listening frame of mind and those are times that every comic in the club would come racing to catch Dave's act. He was notorious for only being able to take a certain amount of heckling before he would just snap and start passive-aggressively cutting audience members into sushi-sized pieces of goo.

More than once an audience member would just get up and leave in the middle of his dissection, unable to handle one more cut from a guy who was able to be ferociously mean and yet adorably likeable all at the same time. I once watched him make a female heckler cry, which takes a specific type of talent and force of personality that is exceedingly rare. When provoked, Letterman didn't care whom he gutted, including one infamous occasion when he beat on a drunken Ringo Starr like a pinata after the former Beatle started to heckle him.

Those were the times when you realized that you were seeing a star in the rough. He might not have been the funniest person in the club. He probably wasn't in the top five on any night he was performing. But there wasn't anyone who was as good a performer, or who looked more like a star than David Letterman. Even when he was dangerous and slightly mean-spirited you couldn't look away and that's a trait that he carried with him his entire career.

Letterman's anger wasn't always directed at just the audience during this period. At the time, "Mork & Mindy" was just taking off and Robin Williams was already a sensation. He was at the Comedy Store quite a bit while the show was in production and he developed this bad habit of "absorbing" the best jokes from someone's routine and then spitting the lines out as an ad-lib during a taping of his show. Most comics didn't believe he was doing it consciously, but when a couple of Letterman's lines appeared in an episode, Dave very famously cornered Williams backstage at the Comedy Store and threatened to punch him out. Williams offered Letterman a guest spot as payment for the lines and that was the weird set of circumstances that led to Letterman's first appearance on "Mork & Mindy."

These are the kind of scenes that won't get written about in a Letterman biography or remembered in the television retrospectives. No one will talk about the fact that at one point Letterman refused to talk to Jerry Seinfeld and some of the other "newer" comics after they crossed the informal picket line at The Comedy Store during a fight with owner Mitsi Shore over their pay. It's one of those forgotten periods in show business, even to most of the people who were there at the time.

And that's fine, because at the end of the day, those stories don't much matter when you're talking about the legacy of David Letterman. But I remember them because it reminds me how far he's come over his long career. He's worked hard to be the best performer he can be. He's set aside grudges, he's struggled to become at least a somewhat better person. David Letterman has always been something special and while it took the world a while to catch on, it's been fun watching his talent take him as high as a guy can rise on late night television.

I can remember standing with Letterman outside the side entrance to the club and talking about whatever weird crap comics talked about back then. I'm lucky enough to have some vague memories of cracking mean-spirited jokes at the expense of whatever comic we tended to think was a hack. I somewhat remember us spending a long, kinda drunken spell mocking this comedian who had just made his first appearance on the "Tonight Show" with an act that revolved around the fact that he was from Bangladesh and "Man, are they hungry there." And hearing him derisively talk about Jimmy Walker (whom he wrote some jokes for at one point) are some of the funniest moments I've ever experienced. It's an odd sensation to both cringe and laugh uncontrollably at the same time. And yet there was a regular occurrence if you spent anytime around Letterman back then.

I wished I remembered more about those times, but the truth is that like most events in our lives, we don't recognize those small, important moments until long after they've passed into forgotten history. I'm sorry I don't have those days on film, but I'm glad that we do have a few decades of film showing David Letterman at his best. He's a talented guy and I'm going to miss seeing him on my TV every week.

Lots of television fans have warm memories of David Letterman's talent. What I remember most about him was his talent, persistence and charm even before he was a household name.