With David Letterman’s run on late night television coming to an end this week, it reminded me of just what a huge deal it was when Letterman, upset at being snubbed by NBC when they went with Jay Leno to be Johnny Carson’s replacement on the Tonight Show, pulled up his tent stakes in the early 1990s and moved his show to CBS. Or, at least to me at the time, it seemed like a big deal. Staying up late was what I did back then, so the landscape of late night TV was both well-known and important to me. And Dave, well, I always thought of Dave as being our generation’s answer to Carson, an ironic, sometimes caustic, personification of our current, more sophisticated sense of humor (yes, I know, it sounds obnoxious now but I had the typical self-infatuation that came with being young back then). So when Dave’s new show hit the airwaves for the first time on CBS, it really was appointment viewing for me and my seeming twelve roommates at the time (we numbered more like 6 – 8, but those guys could fill a room and seemed like a small throng even when well behaved).
Dave’s first show on CBS didn’t disappoint. It was a completely entertaining slab of television with nary a lull in the laughs for the entire length of its running time. Of course, as an inaugural broadcast, the show was replete with celebrity cameos. The one that I always remember the most was, about 20 minutes in, Paul Newman stood up in the audience and asked, “Where the hell are the singing cats?” After Dave informed him that there were, indeed, no singing cats, Newman indicated that he was in the wrong theater and walked out of the show with an air of dejection. It was a classic WTF Letterman moment and pure comedy gold as far as I was concerned. There used to be a clip of it on YouTube but it was pulled down several years ago, probably at the insistence of Letterman’s attorneys, otherwise I would have posted it on here for you to see for yourselves. If you didn’t see it during the original broadcast, trust me, it was a bit that came off perfectly and the audience loved it.
However, the reason I remember it so well is that I pirated it for my own comedic purposes later that week. I was a junior at Penn State at the time the show aired, and the following Saturday afternoon, the football team had a home game that I had a ticket for. By this point in my college career I had a job on weekends, and wouldn’t you know I was scheduled to work that Saturday. However, my shift was late enough where I could catch the better part of the first two quarters (the first half if I was lucky), so I resolved to go for as long as I could and then depart for my shift when the time came.
I can’t even remember who we were playing that day, but it was a great, crystal clear and sunny Saturday afternoon, perfect for an early season football game. Unfortunately, the game lagged a little more than I hoped it would, and by midway through the 2nd quarter, I was coming up upon the time where I needed to get the hell out of there if I was going to be at work on time. However, as I was biding my time for a break in the game, a sudden inspiration came to me. Now, at the time, Beaver Stadium held somewhere north of 80,000 or so people (it’s actually significantly larger now), and even though I knew that only a hundred or so would notice me if I did something stupid, the prospect of inviting attention to myself in front of that many people was still daunting. As such, I leaned over and whispered my plan to my one roommate who was sitting next to me. He thought it was a great idea. So, once I had a break in the action, I stood up suddenly, and with all the adrenaline of performing live in front of thousands of people, I yelled at the top of my lungs:
“Where the hell are all the singing cats!?!?!?!?!?!!!”
I then waved my arms at the field in a dismissive gesture of disgust, and walked my ass right out of that stadium. I have to admit, I didn’t give myself time to notice the crowd’s reaction in great detail, but I could hear my roommate laughing, and I got the general impression that roughly half of the people in my section got the reference and thought it was funny. The other half looked at me in confusion like I was some kind of psychotic who went off his meds and was having an episode. Either way, what really sold it was the fact that I apparently was willing to walk the hell out of a major college football game to get my joke over with the crowd.
So I left the stadium, went to work, and in the haze and activity that was a college weekend in my 20s, caught up with my roommates again maybe two or three days later. According to them, the gag went over like gangbusters. Of course, they may have just wanted to make me happy, or they may have been in that happy state of intoxication where everything seems funny, but either way, that was my tribute to Dave after his first show. Recollecting it all these years later is my tribute to him after his last. From what I understand, the quality of his show varied somewhat over the years, but he truly was my generation’s more acerbic, more sarcastic, more wickedly humorous answer to Johnny Carson. We’ll miss you Dave. Enjoy that sunset you’re riding off into.
And keep an eye out for those singing cats . . .
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