There is an entire generation of black women who owe our very nerdiness to David Letterman — the man and the show.
There is no earthly way that in 1982 when Letterman started hosting his Late Night with David Letterman on NBC that any of us would have seen any semblance of ourselves — or been caught dead laughing at — “Stupid Pet Tricks,” “Viewer Mail,” “The Man Under the Stairs” or Larry “Bud” Melman if it weren’t for the dark, self-loathing mind of the man who likes to drop ripe fruit off the roof just to play its demise back in slow motion.
Probably the most likely and most logical choice based on the obvious markers of gender, race and sexuality would be Wanda Sykes, but Wanda Sykes was either getting a graduate degree in accounting or trying to figure out how to ultimately disappoint her parents’ middle-class black aspirations by leaving forever the straight world (pun intended) for comedy.
Anyway, in 1982 I was a junior at Greenhills High School and my mother, an Advanced Placement English teacher, had already convinced me I was a writer.
I joined the newspaper, the yearbook and the poetry “magazine” staffs. The newspaper staff met mid-week, and on those Wednesday afternoons I sat and eavesdropped on a trio of white boys and their line-by-line reenactments of Letterman’s skits from the nights before.
I knew there was late-night television, I just was unaware any of it deserved watching.
These three guys were the very embodiment of every nerd stereotype imaginable: a vague boy odor comprising day-old sweat, feet, dandruff, zit cream and virginity. They had oily, splotchy skin; their clothes were at least half a decade out of synch and they clowned and verbally abused one another not over girls, dates or sports but over math equations.
Even in the Land of Them, there exists a pecking order. They’d always huddle over pages they were supposed to be laying out to one-up one another on who could precisely remember a Letterman set-up from his monologue or Letterman’s comeback from a celebrity guest.
It was an all-out bromance and I couldn’t take it any longer. Done sniggling on their sidelines — and some days I could not separate if my laughter was with them or at them — I chimed in and asked them to clarify some joke they were trying to recall, or maybe, with a laugh in my voice, I asked them to repeat the name of one of Letterman’s growing cast of weird stock characters.
And like all interlopers, I was greeted with dead silence and blank and quick-blinking stares. The answer, whatever it was, was a quick brush-off delivered in that paternalistic, “Oh, but you wouldn’t understand” tone.
Immediately I knew two things: This Letterman guy was head of some huge, possibly national yet covert clique of nerdy white guys who were in-breeding themselves to pass the torch off to one another (turned out I was spot-on about that one, especially in late-night television). Secondly, this was something I had to see for myself, my beloved sleeping be damned.
So in the first year of his late-night show and after years of floundering around as an Indianapolis weatherman, joke writer and host of a hastily failed mid-morning network show despite being blessed by Mary Tyler Moore, I signed up to watch Letterman with the same commitment most folks pour into long-term relationships, excellence at sports or watching Saturday Night Live, despite that it has not been consistently funny in at least a decade.
My next day’s listlessness, dark eyes and inattentiveness were regularly rewarded; mostly, I was very surprised at how much of Letterman’s off-brand humor I really caught.
Mostly, watching Letterman through the early 1980s and 1990s was like being a tourist with a suitcase and walking through Times Square of that era before Rudolph Giuliani helped turn it into Disneyland. The show was dark, clunky, dangerous and a little seedy. It felt like everyone there knew stuff you (I) did not. And laughing at it always felt like laughing inappropriately in church or during a funeral.
This will seem far-fetched and it feels a little out there to even think it, and perhaps that is what makes it ring the truest: By watching David Letterman when I wasn’t yet fully formed as a writer, a thinker, a seer, a reader or even as a teenager gave me great hope that the world, or some reasonable part of it, would give me a chance if I could only somehow get its attention.
And isn’t that part and parcel of what life can be about, if we allow ourselves to believe that we can and should be dreamers? If we relax our anxieties and believe, once and for all, in the weirdness, the quirks and creases of ourselves, aren’t we also allowing ourselves to believe and accept the fact that there are other life signs like us and that one day we will meet and gather, finding comfort in our similarities and hope in what we can do beyond the late-night blue flicker of our television sets behind closed doors?
This is what watching early Letterman meant to me, a black, struggling teenaged suburban girl alone in her head and in her books in her own handwriting.
I dreamed of the day I would do something of merit — any silly, little, off-kilter thing — that would warrant a call from a Letterman producer.
If I ever had a Bucket List, one line item on it was to sit next to David Letterman in a chair once occupied by Sly Stone, Rickie Lee Jones, Oprah Winfrey and Andre 3000.
I always wanted to tell David Letterman to his face about the three stinky virgins who, by eschewing my entree into their private Nest of Nerds, drew me in even more.
Because as the curtain prepares to close May 20 on his role as late-night host and the accolades and tributes pour in and stack up, I know that David Letterman ain’t never had the love of a good black woman like me — especially one greatly formed, shaped and influenced by a white guy like him.
So in this way I am a fan in mourning, grieving the loss of Letterman at night and sadder still over the absence of the presence of someone like me.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in May 13-19, 2015.