On a Monday night in January 2005, David Letterman walked onto the Late Show stage and did what he always did. He told jokes about the famous, the political, and the absurdly current. Paris Hilton’s dog was in there. Donald Trump’s hair was in there. John Kerry and George W. Bush were in there. The audience laughed before it knew it was hearing a dead man’s new material.[1]
After Johnny Carson died in 2005, David Letterman opened his show with a monologue made entirely of jokes Carson had quietly sent him during retirement. Letterman revealed the writer only after the jokes had landed.
Carson had died on Jan. 23, 2005, more than a decade after leaving The Tonight Show in May 1992.[1] In public, he had become a memory, the former late-night monarch who had stepped away cleanly. In private, one old routine remained. He read the morning newspapers. He wrote jokes.[1]
Peter Lassally, one of Carson’s former producers, told Letterman that the thing Carson missed after retiring was the monologue.[1] Carson would often call Lassally and deliver jokes over the phone, still shaping the day’s scraps into setups and punch lines for an audience of one.[1]
Only after much prodding, Lassally said, did Carson agree to send some of the jokes to Letterman.[1] Letterman’s Late Show had been on CBS since 1993, after his years hosting NBC’s Late Night.[2] By 2005, Letterman was no newcomer, but Carson’s shadow still reached across late night. The old host was contributing in the most Carson-like way possible, invisibly, through the writing.
The secret writer
Letterman’s tribute monologue was built from that private stash. The jokes, according to the Associated Press report carried by TODAY, had been sent by Carson in his final months.[1] Letterman did not announce that before beginning. He let the material pass first as ordinary late-night material, as if it had come from that day’s writers’ room.
One setup involved scientists working on an airplane that could fly 50 miles above Earth. At that distance, Letterman said, only two man-made objects would be visible. “One is the Great Wall of China,” he said, “and the other is Donald Trump’s hair.”[1]
Another joke turned on Paris Hilton’s dog, Tinker Bell, who had been missing for several days. Carson’s punch line placed the dog “with the Taco Bell chihuahua making a sex video.”[1] The reference was pure 2005, which is part of what makes the episode so odd. Carson was not mailing museum pieces. He was still writing for the week’s celebrity weather.
The political jokes had the same current-events snap. When John Kerry was criticized over throwing away some of his military service medals, Carson’s answer was that President Bush, “not to be outdone,” threw away his National Guard “spotty attendance records.”[1]
One last monologue
After the monologue ended, Letterman returned to his desk and told the studio audience who had written what they had just heard.[1] The reveal came after the laughs, not before them. Carson’s lines had been asked to do the old nightly job by themselves, setup, pause, punch line, laughter.
Lassally later told Letterman that Carson had been delighted when Letterman used the jokes and the audience laughed.[1] For a man who had left the stage in 1992, it was a strange final encore. No entrance music. No curtain call. Just a few topical lines moving from a retired comedian’s morning newspaper to another host’s cue cards, then out into the studio where the audience was waiting.
