Today marks the tenth anniversary of David Letterman wrapping up thirty-three years of late night network television.
To coincide with the occasion, LateNighter has published an oral history of how that finale was put together — and delivered to CBS just minutes before airtime. It was part of a 2018 book by Scott Ryan, “The Last Days Of Letterman,” which covered the six weeks leading up to the big goodbye.
The piece included reminiscences from several former Letterman staffers (many of whom had been with him through the years of “Late Night” on NBC and “The Late Show” on CBS) who revealed the process behind each element of the May 20, 2015 final episode — starting with the monologue…
Dave begins with a joke written by former Carson writers Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland: “I’ll be honest with you: It’s beginning to look like I am not going to get The Tonight Show.”
Writer Jim Mulholland: We did write that joke. We did various versions of that joke. I don’t think we ever insulted Dave with those jokes. That is one thing about Johnny and Letterman: they liked self-deprecating jokes.
Writer Steve Young: We started to work ahead a little bit on the last show. Everybody wanted to have a piece of that action. We wrote well ahead of time. I wrote a couple pages. Bill Scheft wrote a couple pages. Old times: staffers and former monologue writers submitted jokes.
Bill Scheft: The Tonight Show joke was always going to be first out of the chute. In twenty-four years, I remember a handful of times when the opening remarks had been set a few hours before the taping, but never the day before.