Callaroga Shark Media. Yeah. My next guest is Mike Chisholm. He hosts
The Letterman Podcast. Hi, I'm Johnny Mack with your daily comedy news.
I hope you caught my little lettermanesque tribute there. The Letterman Podcast celebrates the
incredible body of work done by broadcast legend David Letterman and company. On The
Letterman Podcast, Mike highlights folks who worked for Dave or were part of any
of his show's productions. People had an accounter with one of his shows,
or are enthusiasts with relevant discussion points or memories pertaining to any of Letterman's productions
or endeavors. I've split this one up into two parts. We did about
eighty minutes ross. I'll give you half today, half tomorrow. Here's my
interview with Mike Chisholm. I wear many hats, and when I look at
my own stuff, For example, I host a comedy podcast, and as
I explain, I know a lot more about comedy than most people, but
the people that know more about it know a lot more than I do.
So I was prepping for this podcast, I was like, all right,
I know a lot about Letterman. I'm a big letterman fan. Let me
check out some episodes of Mike's pod, and then I was like, oh,
I'm out of my depth here. I can't talk writers and producers.
This guy knows his stuff. Props to you. Where did the podcast come
from? What gave you the idea? Oh? Man? Okay, So
there's a whole bunch of ways too that I can answer this question, because
the answer, of course, has a ton of depth to it. You
know, it all really started. I mean, my love of Dave has
gone ever since, you know, back to my first time. I can
remember seeing the show. I was eight nine years old, and I remember
the show that I saw, and the idea that adults could act silly was
so charming to me. I had always attracted to broadcasters. I love mister
Rogers. Growing up. I'm a Canadian, so hawking it in Canada was
always the thing to me. You know what. And it wasn't Bob Cole
and Harry Neil who called the play by play. It was Dave Hodge.
It was Ron McClean. I love Ron McClain. I liked pro wrestling,
so Vincent man Agrilla Monsoon I loved broadcasters. It fascinated me And the thing
about Dave is that he is not a pure comedian. He's got a razor
sharp wit, no doubt, He's a broadcaster. He's a broadcaster in comedy,
in variety. I don't like using that word so much, but he's
He would take all of the chaos and things going on around him and he
would almost treat it like he was a reporter. And I found that very
charming. When Dave was going to finish his run on late night television in
twenty fifteen, I knew I needed to go to New York and see him
one more time that night. I actually and you talk about this level of
knowledge that I have, Yeah, I read all the books. I did
my very best to try and learn as much as I possibly could about the
show behind the scenes. But I had an encounter with Dave right before before
the show that day April twentieth, twenty fifteen, where I was part of
the Q and A that he did before the show that picked. That moment
where he was looking back at Paul and using me. I like to say,
he used me as a comedy speedbag was immortalized. It was a picture
of that moment was taken and put into the New York Times into the New
Yorker, and just that moment was a seminal moment. After that, I
became friends with some of the people who worked behind the scenes online. Became
friends with some of the people who worked behind the scenes. And there's a
guy who you could see over my left. His name is Rich Sheckman.
That's a picture from his memorial. Rick Sheckman was a They call him the
film coordinator, but he essentially was an executive producer or a producer of Letterman
for thirty two years. He and I became a really became very close friends.
And I said, look, I'm a huge podcast fan and I've been
waiting for the Letterman podcast to come out. I mean, as you know,
there are these podcasts that do a deep dive on pretty much any subject
you could ever want, and folks who are enthusiast if those subjects can enjoy
the podcast, become part of a community, all of that stuff. I
was waiting for years for a Letterman podcast to come out. One never did.
And so I said to Shaky, I said, look, I want
to do this. I need a conciliaria, I need a Tom Hagen.
Will you be that guy? For me, he said, Michae, I'll
be that guy for you. He set up a couple intros for me,
and the rest is an ongoing history that's still being rewritten. So thank you
for letting me spout off on that long winded answer. But we could I
could give an equally long winded answer with other pieces of information that led to
this podcast happening, and there's just a lot there, So thank you for
that. I was so excited. I stumbled across the podcast. I had
Mark Malkoff on from the Carson Podcast and he's got a new one inside Late
Night, And when I was doing that, I stumbled across this and I
was like, Oh, I didn't know about this one, And I'm so
excited because for me, I've got what up to about one hundred and ten
episodes or so that I can dive through now. I had no idea.
I was psyched. I think episode one thirty comes out tomorrow. Yeah,
you know what, I get that a lot. I didn't know that this
thing existed. Yeah, you know, my savvy when it comes to getting
it out there is almost nil. But I like that. People ask me
all the time, you know what happens if Worldwide Pants that's Dave's production company,
wants to scoop you up or something, and I heartily say, you
know, if he's the mothership, I'm just saying, beam me up please.
I like being indie. It feels like I'm an indie band, which
I probably desperately wanted to be a part of. In the nineties as I
was growing up, the indie music sometimes was cooler than the popular music that
was out there being played on the radio. And I feel like there's a
little bit of that vibe with the show because I am so independent and I
am I'm not doing anything to market the thing. I'm just letting it grow
organically, and it's on YouTube and Apple and Spotify, and there's an audience,
a genuine bonafide audience on each one of those platforms, and it's a
lot of fun growing this thing and letting people discover it organically. It also
takes the pressure off. Doing a podcast about David Letterman is a pretty high
wire and there's a lot of people with a lot of opinions, So being
indie is fun. I think you're smart there. Anytime something goes official,
just top mind, like an unofficial Star Wars fans podcast is always going to
be a million times cooler than the official Star Wars podcast, even if you
get George Lucas the unofficial one. If it's a fans podcast, you don't
have even if there's no pressure from the official folks, there's still If you're
doing the official Star Wars podcast, you're not gonna get on and bash the
Acolyte. You're just not gonna do that, whereas you might on the fans
podcast. So I think you're smart there. That said, if Dave calls,
of course you're gonna say, yeah, that's the dream, Oh,
it is the dream. And and I like the analogy with the Star Wars.
Yeah, if it's an official thing, Dave Filone's gonna show up and
he's gonna have a list of five six things that he can talk about and
an entire legion of things that he can't talk about, whereas if he goes
on something that's a little bit more off the beaten trail, and I've had
that. I'll tell you this with these staffers, Johnny, Like, seriously,
some of these staffers, I think I got them on the show because
we're unofficial, because they're also got that sort of punk rock kind of mentality,
that indie mentality. They dig it, they groove on it. Now
there are some also, though that's a double edged sword. There are some
who are like, so the reverence that they have for Dave and the company,
you know, well, it's not very many, but two or three
people that said, but if you were officially, if you were officially affiliated
with Worldwide Pants, we would come on. But we can't out of respect
because of that. I respect that. But for the vast majority of them,
I think you're exactly right. I get a much looser conversation with people.
And the ironic part about what you say, the unofficial Star Wars fans
would bash the acolyte. Here's the thing. The Letterman Podcast is our tagline.
It's where a celebration of the greatest body of broadcast work in history,
that of David Letterman and company. So we celebrate this stuff that show for
thirty two years. They were miners. They would go down in the mine.
They put their little hats on and they would turn the lights on and
they would go into the deep dark recesses of pop culture, of current events,
and they would mine comedy and sometimes they would come out with diamonds bigger
than their head and just amazing stuff. But guess what do they do.
They just cast that diamond aside and they keep mining because there's a show the
next day, and our show is a celebration. So while you could easily
go down the path of salaciousness or gossip or maliciousness or any of that stuff,
I have chosen that our show will not focus on that at all.
If things come up organically, okay, we might toss them around a little
bit, but that is not the focus of it. And I think a
lot of shows that do deep dives into these topics enjoy going into some of
the darker recesses of human behavior, and that's just not something that I'm interested
in doing. Because there were so many diamonds. I'd rather focus on the
diamonds than the coal. I think you nailed it there. As you were
speaking, I was thinking. I talked to Malkoff. Then I had Jason
Zinnemann on the York from the New York Times, and we talked about Letterman,
and not once did I think about some of the gossipy stuff that Dave
got trapped up in in the nineties or Zeros, and I haven't even thought
about this. When I think of David Letterman, I'm thinking about throwing stuff
off a five story tower. And I think your stick is right. Let's
remember the good times and to do an episode on one of those other things.
Who cares? And I could tell that's just why would you do that?
That's not what you do, and it's we do live in a culture
where clickbait is key, and if you can throw some gotcha stuff out there,
you're gonna get clicks, you're gonna get views. The good news is
I'm immune to that. I don't care about clicks and views. I care
about putting out a show where I can have itches that I've had in the
recesses of my mind for decades, scratched, and to talk about this stuff
that I just love so much and these people that I love so much.
Gosh, Dave made his producers, his writers, the crew around him a
part of the show, and there was a secret to that. They made
us all feel like we were part of a secret club. And as somebody
who felt like it was in the club and gets to go and talk to
the folks who were actually in the clubhouse, that is a great thing.
You and you've probably born. I've worked in an office for a long time.
Certain that you've had a work environment where there are people around. Guess
what, You're going to see every type of behavior that is a known to
man if you're in a situation like that. I've also been part of a
family for a long time. These people, a lot of them were together
for multiple decades, and even the ones who weren't won three, five,
ten years together. You get a group of people who are together like that,
that are like a family, and in that work environment, you're going
to see every behavior known to man. The difference is in the offices that
I've worked in, that stuff doesn't get broadcast. You see it, it
happens, but it doesn't get broadcast out there. When you're in something public,
like a show like this, that stuff gets broadcast. And it's one
of the unfortunate things about entertainment, the entertainment business is that sometimes people are
more interested in that than the actual product that comes out. I'm just not
one of those people. Let me ask you about twelve thirty versus eleven thirty
versus. Now, this is I've been struggling with this, especially as I've
gotten back into Dave, and I remember back in the eighties staying up till
one thirty in the morning, four nights a week. And then my godmother
got me a VCR in nineteen eighty five, and then that solved that problem.
But the amount of times I said, man, if Dave were on
at eleven thirty, I would watch this thing every night. Then Dave moves
to eleven thirty, and I lasted about a year and a half, and
then I recently realized I didn't watch most of the last twenty years. It's
like Howard Stern to me, like in that way that I consider myself a
really big fan. And at some point the work stopped connecting with me.
I don't know if it was because I was in my twenties and you go
out and you hang out in New York City and you're dating people and you're
hanging out and you're not watching TV. But I also come back to the
twelve thirty. We're all in on this renegade thing versus eleven thirty. Now
it's an Armani suit and shoes, and it's a little more. I always
called it establishment letterman. And now we have this third period where again this
guy that I love puts these things out on Netflix, and it takes me
three weeks to get it around to them. So can you be my therapist
here? What is wrong with me? Nothing's wrong with you. It's funny
talking to You'd mentioned Zennman. I've talked to him, and I've talked to
Bill Carter about this. Bill Carter, of course wrote The Late Shift and
The War for Late Night. Zenniman wrote, let him in the last giant
of Late Night. Fascinating guy to talk to you. I'm sure you loved
talking to him. I love talking to Jason. Yeah. Just absolutely great,
great guy, they both are. I think it's part of it lays
into where your formative years were. My formative years when I graduated high school,
it was nineteen ninety four. Okay, so I watched I was right
in my formative years, the cement very wet. Yet there was still a
measure of somewhat of intelligence and cognition that was there because it was at that
time and place when Late Shift happened, when Dave moved, because it was
a tumultuous move from eleven thirty to twelve or from twelve thirty to eleven thirty,
I should say it was a tumultuous move, and folks who were that
age, that was my formative years right there. I was already on team
Dave and excited about what was happening, really fascinated by it. Dave was
on the cover of Time magazine, he was on Rolling Stone multiple times.
He was the biggest news story in entertainment around the world. Everybody knew what
was going on because I was at that time and place Late Show. For
me, there was no problem. I completely understood the fact that Dave needed
to go to a broader audience. I knew why I liked Late Night better
than The Tonight Show. Whereas my dad was a Johnny Carson guy. I
knew that I like that show better. I also had this awareness that if
Dave moved to eleven thirty, he would have to be more like the Tonight
Show. In fact, Dave wanted the Tonight Show. He wanted to do
that. He wanted to get a little bit more mainstream, but he couldn't.
In my mind, there's a guy by the name of Don Giller.
If you go to Don Giller's YouTube channel, he is the ultimate Letterman archivist.
He has everything that Dave has ever done, and has put a lot
of it on very thoughtfully and carefully put it on YouTube as compilations. And
I asked Don about this very subject once because he is Don's an older guy
now and he has gone through the eras just like you have, and he
competed to Mozart. He said, Okay, look, early Mozart is different
than later Mozart, but it's still Mozart all the way. And I feel
the exact same way about Dave. To be the therapist here, you don't
have David Letterman doing My Guest needs no introduction. My Next Guest needs no
introduction, which to me is a phenomenal long form piece. You don't have
that if you don't have Late Night with David Letterman where he's throwing stuff off
the building. When he was hanging out with Billie Eilish in the last season
of Late My Next Guest, he's doing go karts with her. So yes,
he's sitting down and having the intimate Tom Snyder and Tom Snyder of course
a big influence on Dave. He's having these long form conversations with her where
he's really getting into and he's talking with Phineas and he's talking about these things,
But then there are excerpts, and the excerpts are he doing go karts
with her, or with Lizzo. He's playing the flute with Lizzo, or
he's going out in Chicago, you know, for the places that Tina Fey
went to when she was at Second City and eating this bad but very good
food. And you've got these little things. Those are to me sprinklings of
Late Night. They're little nods. They're a little homagous to the stuff he
would do on Late Night. But yeah, as he matured and as he
grew, he knew he was appealing to a broader audience, and so some
of the more subversive of some of the more weird stuff had to go in
the back. But then you look at some of the stuff that they did
on Late Show, like the stuff they would do with Alan Calter, for
example, the announcer. You got Alan Caulter doing a mockup of a one
in hundred collect commercial and he's sitting there and then they're combining it with Saving
Private Ryan, the hot movie at the time, and he's sitting there doing
a one in harndred collect commercial with his guts hanging out of him because He's
part of a war zone, and it's what the heck is this? So
I think a lot of folks who loved Late Night didn't necessarily look for those
moments in Late Show where they were constant nods to the stuff that they would
do in Late Night. It was just done in a different way. I
think the eleven thirty thing is on point. You'll know this, But for
younger listeners, there was a really cool, edgy comedian that was a frequent
guest on Letterman and would crush and I will use the word edgy to describe
Jay Leno. Sure, yeah, ye, just a great guest. You
mentioned Tom Snyder. I recently discovered it. It's some sort of homebrew dock
on YouTube about the Carson Letterman Snyder relationship. There. I feel like I
missed the boat on Tom, and I want to go back and do a
deep dive on Tom. But in that doc there were more clips than I've
ever seen of the Daytime Show. I have no knowledge of the Daytime Show
because I discovered Dave with Late Night and maybe I saw the Daytime Show once.
Do you have any command of that period of it. I'm on a
mission to learn as much as I can about the daytime show that I can.
I know our listeners here can't see my set, but if you look
behind me on my set there you'll see a red folder with an Emmy on
it. That's actually that's the Emmy. Congratulations, you've been not nominated for
an Emmy folder That was given out for the David Letterman Show, The Morning
Show. And so you've got this show that showed up on Morning last It
only lasted a few months in the morning time. It was ninety minutes long,
and it was David Letterman doing the stuff that David Letterman did on late
night television in the morning, and it was People were completely puzzled by it.
And it was canceled unfortunately because of ratings and stuff, but still nominated
for Emmy's different, very excellent piece. Now, at that time, the
Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. Tom Dave loved Tom. Tom would host The
Tomorrow Show. That was the show that did come on after Carson for a
long time, and it was a long form conversation show. We've actually had
his daughter, Anne Marie Snyder on our show and we've talked a lot.
She's busting her butt to get a documentary made about Tom because he is.
Many do consider him the greatest long form conversationalist in broadcast history. A lot
of people have a lot of reverence for Tom, including David Letterman, and
back at that time, there's a whole bunch of irony that's here. Tom
Snyder was on The Tomorrow Show. He and Carson famously did not get along
very well. And when Carson signed his I don't know if this is last,
but one of his last deals, which gave him a tremendous amount of
power. Johnny Carson arguably one of the most powerful men in show business when
he was at his zenith. One of the things that he got was a
lighter schedule, and then he also had command of the twelve thirty slot afterwards.
Subsequently, the Tom Snyder Tomorrow Show was canceled, and Late Night with
David Letterman slid in because at that point Dave's Morning Show was canceled. Now
there's a pulpach ironies here. Dave was on the Tomorrow Show as a guest.
Tom loved what Dave was doing in the morning, all this crazy stuff.
And then we find ourselves a few months later, or maybe a year
later, we find ourselves where Tom's show is getting canceled and Dave is getting
put in that slot as the heir apparent, Carson being one of the producers
on his show. And there's the ironic part really heats up later on when
Dave goes over to CBS gets the Late Show or Late Show with David Letterman.
He also he basically took the same Carson deal and moved it over to
a new network. So Dave had a tremendous amount of power at that point,
including the twelve thirty slot, his company being able to produce the show
that comes on after Late Show, and who do they hire as the first
host of Late Show but Tom Snyder. And it's a very interesting scenario at
the time. You can watch the Larry Sanders Show, and you know,
with Gary Shanling, which was on HbA at the time, they wove reality
into that as well. That show predicted that Dave would have Tom on as
the guest after. There's a whole bunch of rich, beautiful, organic human
storytelling in the history of these things, and Tom is one of those guys
where I hope that Annie is successful in getting this dock out, not just
out, but like really out there. So a lot of people get to
see the genius of Tom Snyder. But Dave is one of those guys.
If you look at the press conference of hiring Tom at CBS, Dave said,
look back in the day and this is the time without as you mentioned
without VCRs. About that, Dave said that he watched probably eighty percent of
Tom Snyder's show as they were broadcast. Dave is a huge fan of it,
and I think you're seeing echoes of Tom Snyder in what Dave is doing
now as the elder Statesman of broadcasting. He's doing the Tom Snyder thing right
now. You name check to Larry Sanders there, I call it showbiz adjacent.
For thirty plus years, my legacy career is radio, and I've book
shows, and I've been a producer and I've done all that things. I
don't think civilians realize how accurate the backstage stuff at Larry Sanders is. There's
a particular scene I was producing John Gambling in New York, and I guess
it's Gane. Grofflow's character goes in and goes, hey, do you want
to talk to Barry White? And he goes why to F what I want
to talk to Betty White and I'm like, I've been there with the host
who's half listening. I'm like, so, just a fantastic show, Larry
Sanders is. It's groundbreaking in so many ways. There are a few shows
out there where you can look at shows that are on TV today that are
effective, and then you can go back and you can find their ancestors that
kind of broke the ground for that. Gary Shannling had two amazing shows that
did just that. Now here's the thing about Larry Sanders. I was just
talking with I'm not going to say who it was, but one of Dave's
high up writer slash producers, and we were talking about Larry Sanders. It
is just a few weeks back. We were talking about this and he said,
Okay, here's the thing. Here's the thing about Sanders. And most
people, like you say they love Sanders. Most people who worked for for
Letterman like it was a big deal. Every I think it was Sunday night
it would come on. They were so excited when Larry Sanders would come on.
But there was one major difference that this person made and it was I
think it was I think that this is a part of Larry Sanders that might
have had to do with if they were putting in elements of Jay Leno's Tonight
Show into the fabric of the show. But they said nobody was afraid of
Larry. He said, that's the thing he goes. This is where the
suspension of disbelief got interrupted for me, was nobody was afraid of Larry.
They could all go up to him, and they could these real moments like
you just talked about the host that's half listening and half not and whatnot.
Yes, but they weren't terrified of him. And there were a lot of
folks who had a deep reverence, respect, and fear flat out of Dave
and that wasn't represented in Larry. However, there are a lot of folks
who say that was more the atmosphere of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno,
that there was a little bit more casualness there. So that was something that
was really interesting about that. I was listening to your interview with Morty Robert
Morton, and I picked up a hint of that early on the Oh let
me go recap the show with Dave? Has this actually gonna go? I
don't know. I've never heard of Dave's reputation one way or the other.
Is there a street rep for that? Was it scary to go talk to
Dave after a show? The post mortems of and Dave has gone on record
about this, and you can read it in Zinneman's book, you can read
it in Carter's book. I'm not throwing any shade here. Dave's attitude towards
himself and his performance. He some would say he tortured himself because his and
it wasn't about anybody else and screaming at other people or yelling at other people
or getting upset at other people. It was himself. He would get upset
at himself. And when a show wasn't good, and again his version of
a show that's not good. The standard is completely different than someone say like
myself or you who are watching thoroughly entertained by things. And if there was
a mess up of any sort, this would celebrate it because that was the
tone of the show. But then he would go back and lamb based himself.
And you had people there who were the support crew watching this guy that
they love so much torture himself. The good news is that evolved as well,
just like Mozart's music evolved, so too did Dave's attitude towards towards this,
and over the years he developed an attitude where, you know what,
if the show doesn't go, well, there's another show tomorrow night, and
he would be able to reconcile that better than he could early on. But
early on, yes, there was a lot of times where and the cancelation
of the morning show I think was a big part of that. I haven't
asked him that specifically, That's something I would love to ask him, but
I think some of that behavior towards himself was a flat out was flat out
fear that they canceled me once they could cancel me again. We need to
keep a very high standard, and I need the standard I need to have
for myself needs to be the highest of all. Because I'm the host.
It also the buck stops with me. I get it back. Early in
my career, I remember a conversation I had with my host. We had
an hour that I didn't like, and I might have slammed down the headphones
whatever. I'm not on the air at this point. I'm on the other
side of the glass, and she said to me, all right, relax,
it's just an hour. And I go when I stop caring, change
producers, and I totally get the mentality. Yeah, I feel the same
way. Believe it or not, anybody who's ever seen or heard the Letterman
podcast. Believe it or not, I actually feel the same way. It
may not look like it when you look at the product that I put out
there, but I feel the exact same way. There are times where I
will look back at a segment with somebody or a line of conversation. A
lot of the time it's missed opportunity. A lot of the time it's like,
why the heck didn't I ask them this? Why the heck didn't I
ask them that? Or that could have gone better, I could have put
a better shine on this person or that person or whatever. And I'll just
absolutely blast myself. But yet you're exactly right. It's caring, and I
think there's a certain amount of personal development that can be added to that emotion.
Like my life motto is, don't focus on the problem, focus on
the solution. But if I could focus on the solution quickly as opposed to
lamenting on the problem, I'm going to be more effective at that. But
yeah, I think the best shows i've ever watched that I've ever attached myself
to say this with my wife all the time. My wife is an unbelievable
cook. And one of the reasons that she such an effective culinary artist is
because she has that intangible ingredient, and that's love. She puts love into
what she does. And I think that all of us can look out and
we can see things from an entertainment perspective that are manufactured, and we can
see things that are produced with love. And you want the produce with love
stuff. That's the stuff that's going to connect, that's the stuff that's going
to resonate, that's the stuff that's going to stand the test of time.
During that interview with Morty, I was quite surprised to learn, I don't
want to step on your story, how much of he controlled chaos Dave knew
about in advance. That surprised me. Yeah, absolutely, this is something
that if and when I have a conversation with Dave, I certainly want to
go down that path. Early on in the show, the head writer Meryl
Marco and this might even this might have even been knocked off before Late Night
started. I'm not exactly clear. I get different responses from different people about
this. But one of the things that Meryl knew about Dave was that he
had this razor sharp wit. That is just his reactions to things off the
cuff are nothing short of astounding. He is just a genius when it comes
to responding to things. And he was like that when he was doing stand
up at the Comedy Store as well. Heckler's would be absolutely sliced and diced,
and he would do it in a way. I said this on another
interview recently. He was like Muhammad Ali. He wouldn't use vulgarity, he
wouldn't have to use anything. He would dance around it and he would His
weapons were vocabulary and wit and cleverness. And he just was tremendous and Dave
still is to this day. The exchange I had with him in the audience,
I made him laugh, but which is one of the greatest moments of
my life. But it was only a second long because a second later he
came back with another thing that made the audience laugh even more, and that
was Dave's. One of the greatest attributes that David Letterman has, beside his
broadcast ability, is that razor sharp wit. So the idea of surprise the
host was something that was let's surprise the host, let's land, but that
was knocked off very quickly because Dave does not like surprises. He likes to
know what's coming, and so at some point early on, a kind of
culture was built where it would look like it was a surprise, and it
might have been a surprise to the audience. You think about the Andy Kaufman
Jerry Lawler incident, things like that. There are things that might have been
a surprise to even the crew, but Dave would be in on it,
and Dave's logic behind it was, Okay, if I can just show that
same I think this is what it is, but this is what I want
to ask him about. I believe his logic was, if I can just
show that razor sharp wit or that spontaneity, but I know it's coming,
I've got the best of both worlds because I could put the shine on whatever
I want because I know what's coming. I've got some control there. But
at the same time, I can still use those abilities to show spontaneity,
and certainly spontaneity was included in the show. It was a hallmark in my
opinion, but Dave knew what was going on. For the most part.
I loved in the late night era the they would experiment a lot or just
totally deconstruct the format. What's popping in a mind is they did at least
one episode from the back office. Let's not use the set, Let's give
paul A Cassio keyboard, and let's just do the show from the back I
love that kind of episode. Yeah, and there's so many examples of it.
They did an episode on a plane flying from New York to Florida.
They did an episode on the back of a truck where it was trucks that
were driving on an expressway or a parkway. They did a show there.
They did a show, but they would They did that even into the late
show era. They did shows when they were renovating the set and building the
bridges, putting the bridges in to the set. There after the initial first
late show set, they did shows in the lobby for a week. They
would fly in audiences from different cities. They would all sorts of theme shows
that they did it during it was it Hurricane Sandy. I don't know if
it was Hurricane Sandy, but on one of the natural disasters that hit nor'easters
that hit New York. They did shows without an audience, the inventive nature
of and then they would take the show on the road. Of course,
they'd go to Chicago, they'd go to la they'd go to San Francisco,
they would go all sorts of places with the show in London, England,
and so yeah, that was one of the things, many things that they
would do to, as you said, deconstruct the talk show and do something
similar but different. I think I don't know that there's an example of a
program that has done that better than David Letterman's productions. And you see the
influence in those of us who grew up on it. You know, I'm
just some dopey podcaster now, and I'll sometimes friend me too. I'll do
the show from I call it a pool side edition, and the real truth
is it's eighty five and Sonny out and I don't feel like sitting in the
basement, so I take it out there. But like the landscapers show up
next door, and I keep going. And it's that Letterman influencing me though,
Oh especially because it's a comedy show. I'm not doing the world news,
but I'm like, oh, I'm just going to shout over the landscapers
and make a bit out of it. It's so much fun. Yeah,
I love whenever I meet somebody who has been influenced by Dave that way,
where they want to take something a little bit askew and put it into the
events of everyday life. I adore that, and to me, that mischievous
nature of doing something just for the sake of doing it, really not even
knowing why other than it tickles you inside. I think if we did that
more as a culture, as a species, I think we would have a
lot more smiles on our faces. It's so fun to just to do something
a little bit odd. I do the same thing like for the first I
don't know how many episodes it was until it was I said I was gonna
do it until somebody discovered it. A fan of ours so named Andrew discovered
it. But I have in the bottom corner it's a zoom. I used
the zoom technology to build the show, and in the bottom corner, says
The Letterman Podcast with Mike Chisholm, I for almost one hundred episodes, I
misspelled the word podcast and every word it was every episode. It was misspelled
in different ways, and only twice did I have somebody catch it beforehand.
But it didn't get caught on camera. Bill Carter caught it. He takes
me spelled podcast wrong, right, I'm like, oh, I do that
on purpose, but it didn't get out there. And then this Andrew saw
it and said, hey, he put it out there. Heyes, everyone
ever noticed that Mike spells podcast wrong. And then at that point I started
spelling it correctly because someone caught it. But and there are a little l
of that sprinkled into the show where it's just a joke that I find as
a joke and if somebody ever catches it, great, If not, okay,
that's fine too, That's awesome. I love it. I was a
program director at a radio station Long Island. My midday guy ed till he's
on the air one day and he's taking a phone call and he asked the
caller where they are, and they're at some diner and he goes, hold
on, I'll be right there, and he takes a cell phone and he
starts hosting the show from his cell phone, jumps in the car. He's
on the Southern State park Way. He's playing it up. Hey, stupid
driver goes to the diner, has a cheeseburger with the listener, comes back
and finishes the show in the studio, and I thought it was one of
the greatest three hours I'd ever been involved with. And my boss did not
get it was like he was on a cell phone and it sounded lousy.
I'm like, that was amazing. Are you kidding me? Yeah, it's
okay. And I say to the director, Okay, are you kidding me?
We can have the helicopter guy talking about traffic, but we can't do
something like it's not like the listener. I think many times the viewer of
the listener is treated like the lowest common denominator, and I don't like that.
I don't like when audiences do that. I gotta ask you this,
What years were you doing radio in New York? I started professionally in November
of ninety two at WOR, New York. I was there until April o
two, had the station on Long Island for a year and a half.
We ran out of money, and then I was at Serious for a decade.
Okay, did you ever cross paths with a guy by the name of
Alex Bennett? I heard your name check Alex Bennett on the Morty episode.
I Love Alex. Back in the day, Alex and I used to do
a twenty minute non radio show in the hallway every day discussing Bush carry somewhere
near the cubicles on the twenty third floor of Serious No. Thirty six four
Sorry, and we would just talk. But it wasn't the current political discourse
where it's you like the red team and I like the Blue team, so
you're stupid and they hate you. The deal you can have meaningful discussions.
And we were friendly and we did it every day, and we knew we
were going to do it and just let's get each other's goats. And he
is a great guy. Alex is a he's been on this show. When
I talk about Rick Shechman earlier, he was, he is and to this
day, even though Shecky's left us, now Rick Sheckman's best friend, this
show would not exist if it wasn't for Alex Bennett. And so Alex and
I are friends. And he does a panel show weekly over Zoom and has
since I believe he started in the pandemic. You know, he's in his
eighties now, but you can't as when you're a longtime broadcaster like that,
you can't turn it off. And so he started and GABNet. He started
building GABNet and does shows he calls it The Ramble every night, but on
Mondays, every Monday, he does this show at four o'clock Eastern and he
brings on I don't know seven eight people who come on, many of the
more fans of his show. I came on because of Shecky, because I
got to know Shecky, And honestly, I think it was because Shecky was
he was vetting me. He wanted to make sure I wasn't a crazy Okay,
I'm a crazy person, but I'm not I'm not a dangerous crazy person.
I've just got I've got the good crazy. If that's what it is,
that's the thing that makes me dive deep into the things that I love,
whether it be Letterman or Star Wars or music or whatever. The things
that I love, I dive into it. But Checky was betting me,
and so he said, Hey, why don't you come on this show with
Alex Bennett every Monday? And That's what I would do. And that was
one of the ways that he and I got together and got to know each
other, and then as the show would progress, he and I would then
start connecting via phone calls or video calls over the Internet. That kind of
a thing outside of the show, but Alex Bennett, and to this day,
every Monday at four pm Eastern, I try and get on that show
with Alex. He's just he is such a great guy, a legend.
And I like to say this, he paved the road that Howard Stern drove
on. When you look at Alex back in the eighties when he was let
go at one of his positions at wm I want to say it's WMC,
but I don't think it's WMCA, but one of them in New York if
there were two thousand people out there the next day protesting, and Alex was
that guy, he was the rebel rouser. He had a little bit of
that. One of the reasons I think I like Alex so much is because
he's got some of that stuff that Stern has, that letterman has, that
impish, mischievous behavior and just a great guy. And I dig that you
and Alex know each other and now you and I have made that connection.
And folks, by the way, Johnny had no pre interview here. We
did this organically. We came up with this revelation together. So it delights
me to know and respect Alex and love to connect you guys. And it's
random because I, like I said, I discovered the podcast and I'm like,
all right, let me do some prep here. What five episodes can
I listen today? And I picked Morty and I heard the random Alex Bennett.
He also had a run in San Francisco, and he's got a lot
of all the big San Francisco comedians of that era. Robin Williams for sure
comes to mind, but Alex legendary radio personality. Letterman reruns late night reruns
I used to they used to mess around with them. There was the one
that they rotated it three hundred and sixty degrees just for no reason. I
remember, and I've looked. I can't prove this in the internet. Maybe
the story or maybe I hallucinated this. I remember tuning in one night and
they had redubbed the entire show with merv Griffin revoice Dave, and I remember
walking into the middle of it and being like, what is going on here?
Yeah, we need to this is a really good one. That we
need to get the official Letterman channel to put back on there. Good call.
I'm gonna now that this you've said this, I've got a message to
them and say, hey, here's a clip that we should throw on.
Letterman reruns are tricky because there's so many rights issues that are there, and
then Worldwide Pants and Universal have come to an agreement. So when you watch
Dave's YouTube channel, and by the way, anybody who fancies themselves as an
enthusiast of David Letterman subscribe to his YouTube channel, but they're putting clips on
from those eras, and I think that it would be a very cool thing
to revisit that there was the episode where the everything was in reverse, the
reverse angle right. Any times that there was a camera trick of any sort.
You saw this in Stupid Patricks. One of the things about Stupid Stupid
Patricks at the beginning, or Stupid Human Tricks, was the advent of slow
motion, and anytime that there would be something that was added to television,
be it dubbing, be it fans, the camera trick or whatever, they
would mess around with it and it was so fun to watch them do it
and make fun of it. They just there isn't a show out there that
I think that poked fun at themselves, at television, at broadcasting, at
culture the way that they did. One of the things that Dave said to
Tom Snyder early on was that nothing on television is sacred. And to me,
that's okay. There's a young guy who's got this morning show that's crazy
giving himself carte blanche to lampoon anything he wants. I'm super curious today the
Dave that went through led the nation after nine to eleven in some respects,
the Dave that went away and then came back from his heart surgery and there
was some really major heartfelt moments. I'm very curious if the David Letterman of
today would still say that nothing on television is sacred. That's the question that
I want to ask him. So are you saying the Mirv thing did happen?
I didn't make that up. I believe it did. I now that
being said, I don't have it off the top of my head. I
haven't seen it recently, but that does make sense. Mirv was Oh my
gosh, was Mirv. Ever there's a scene with Jeff Altman with Merv Griffin
meowing like a cat that I remember. They used to make fun of IRV
all the time. Paul would every once in a while throw the name MERV
out there. They used to They definitely used to make fun of MRVS.
That sounds right to me, but I will dive onto this immediately after this
episode here and see if that's there. That does sound right, though,
I just can't recall the clip you mentioned Camera Tricks, and I saw Late
Night many times I've recently been reliving. It was my fifteenth birthday. It
had to be fifteen to get in, and my mother knew somebody at NBC
and I got tickets on my fifteenth birthday and I went with my friend Sean.
And unless we're conflating different episodes, we think that was the night Zippy
the Chimp bit Sandra Bernhard and got cut out. But Zippy the Chimp was
a good example of all right, let's strap a camera to a chimp and
let him rollerskate around in the studio and you just you hadn't seen this before,
and it was amazing, was mind blowing. Oh, you can do
that so much fun the monkey cam. I've talked to Sandra on her show,
and she's aware and she has said, yeah, let's do this.
I haven't jumped back on getting her on the show. That's a moment I
want to talk to her about. For sure. You talk about Sandra Bernhard
as a guest. And this is where a lot of folks who love Late
Night and they call Late Night a superior show to Late Show, because you'd
have some of these performance artists on and give them a podium, give them
a platform and a microphone where they could just go and be as creative as
they want to be, whether it's singing, whether it's an obscure type of
comedy piece, whether it's a monologue, whether it's whatever. And Sandra,
I think is a phenomenal example of that. I really like Sandra Bernhardt a
lot. I think she is a trailblazer in many ways. I think she
gave her Like Vett Midler, I think did a really good job of breaking
the mold of what women should be when it comes to a comedian or a
performance artist or whatever. And her stuff with Dave on Late Night was magic.
It was good on Late Show, but it trickled off because Late Show
became more it had to be come more like the Tonight Show. But One
of the casualties of that is you saw less and less of the performance artists
as opposed to the celebrities plugging a movie. And he did. Don't get
me wrong, the booking staff and Dave, they did try and keep that
element in late show. But certainly, if you're going to broaden the appeal
and broaden the audience, some of these pieces that you're talking about here,
they have to be cut along the way. All right, more tomorrow with
Mike Chisholm. This helps me accommodate some travel ahead during the week. Mike
did look into my MERV Griffin thing and here's what we've learned, and they
did dub an episode. You can find the episode on YouTube and I've shared
it in the Facebook group Today Daily Comedy News podcast group. But it's not
nerv. The voice is in Merv's ballpark like. It sounds more like MERV
Griffin than it sounds like me. But it's not MERV. But they definitely
did dub an entire episode. I didn't totally make that up. Some other
things to plug. We've got T shirts, National Donuts Chain t shirts.
Get one link in the show notes. You can subscribe for free to my
substack. That's where I pontificate about the media in the written form. Mickdypod
dot substack dot com. Link of the show notes And if you would like
this thing, ad free calaroga dot com. Slash plus get this show and
a bunch of others on the network. Four ninety nine a month gets you
the whole shebang. No ads, all right, More with Mike tomorrow See then.