Where’s Dave?

I said a word about the departures of Letterman and Stewart when they were announced, but now the reality has set in, and it stings even more than I expected. I am in a kind of mourning for the retirement of Letterman. I’m aware this is absurd, but I know I’m not alone, and I think I know why these changes hit so hard.

A slight digression. In the works of Pieter Brueghel the Elder we may get as close a glimpse as possible of how life was lived by ordinary people until very recently. There are hearty peasants asleep (or drunk) near a haystack they have just raked into being. They dance to pipes and drums to celebrate a successful harvest. They come down a snowy hill with dogs, returning from a hunt. They sin during carnival and repeat for Lent. The days began when the sun rose and ended when it set. The seasons, the growing seasons, dictated the yearly round of their lives. The church calendar dictated feasts and fasts. And little changed for thousand years.

In our urban and suburban lives, the food appears at the market like magic. Electric light has obliterated the distinction between day and night. Our amusements aren’t local and communal, but global yet solitary, or indulged in with only a few other souls at home, in the car on the radio, the TV, the movie screen, iPod or iPad.

Nothing lasts long. Culture is ephemeral. Change is the norm. It’s disorienting. Our ancestors were grounded; we are up in the air. People used to work for the same company for a lifetime. No more. Now entire industries seem to vanish overnight. Silicon Valley calls this disruption. Ordinary people call it catastrophic.

No wonder we cling to a few things that signify continuity. My grandmother was loyal to certain soaps for decades and they left a daily hole in her life when they were finally cancelled. The personnel of sports teams change, but the franchise is always there unless pirated away to some other city. Such betrayal by the Browns, Dodgers and Colts is never forgiven.

TV shows can last a good long time, but not decades. The MASH guys went home. Closing time came for Cheers. The Today Show slogs on, but morning friends like Barbara, Jane and Katie have come and gone. That’s why I think the late shift hosts have been so beloved – first Johnny, 30 years at the desk, now Dave, 33 years. We’d brush our teeth, then lean on a pile of pillows at the end of a jagged, fraught, weary, dispiriting day and a familiar face would appear to provide a little amusement.

The format may have been familiar – monologue, banter with the bandleader, Carnac, Stump the Band, Stupid Pet Tricks, Top Ten List – but that’s okay. We’ve had enough surprises and discontinuity for one day. We’re happy for Johnny to be Johnny, Dave to be Dave, to have them offer a few snarky jokes at the expense of poltroon politicians, witless celebrities, and the bizarre freak show the daily news provides. Though it’s lame, we like to see them feign fear of wild animals, skewer pompous guests and laugh with stars we will never meet, but would like to.

Five nights a week they were reliably there, enlarging our world but in the cozy environment of a never-changing set, at a predictable time. The date with Dave was familiar, soothing, unchanging, amusing and, it turns out, essential.

And Letterman may have been the last of his breed. He came from the middle class of a middle-sized town in the middle of the country. It was the kind of place sociologists once studied as a paradigm of dead normal and manufacturers of soap or soft drinks used as a test market. The ethos was modesty, honesty, a horror of arrogance, hypocrisy or showing off. Which is what Dave, tellingly and self-critically, said he did for a living. What other major star in interviews so often talked of his inadequacy. It is not false modesty when the interviewee admits to guilt and fear, more likely his birthright.

I, too, came from this place and time. I was born one state to the right and three months after Letterman. I think it no accident that so many of our satirists and social critics came from this ground – Thurber, E.B. White and Sherwood Anderson in Ohio, Booth Tarkington and Kurt Vonnegut in Dave’s Indiana, Sinclair Lewis and Fitzgerald in Minnesota, Mark Twain in Missouri.

Satirists are very often conservative moralists. The jester pokes fun to make a point. Dave, who’d had his own struggles with life’s temptations, was often surprising gentle with guests who had screwed up, while expecting them to try and do better, even offering career and life advice. (Robert Downey, Jr., Justin Bieber). But he cut the careless and feckless, the pushy and those willing to abase themselves for tabloid fame no slack. (Palins, Kardashians).

Now who are we going to rely on for a laugh, a dart aimed at puncturing pomposity, and the willingness to say the emperor has no clothes? Many of the new breed are lightweights, afraid of being too dark, of being unpopular or controversial. Dave couldn’t help showing his boredom, ire, or contempt, but you also knew what he liked and who he admired.

We are inclined to dismiss comics and jesters, to scorn them as trivial entertainment, but such figures provide continuity in a chaotic world and contribute a little shot of truth in a sea of lies. Dave was my generation’s jester, and his departure makes us feel alone and mortal. If he’s leaving, can our sign off be far behind?

The closing montage of Dave’s last show’s was filled with contemporaries of ours who have already preceded us into the dark – Andy Kaufman, Farrah Fawcett, George Miller, Gilda Radner, Harvey Pekar, Robin Williams, Warren Zevon, many more. And the unkindest cut was the fact that, in our sadness, our TV friend was no longer there to cheer us up.

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