Daaaaaaaaavid Lettermaaaaan

My sister took me to a taping of the Late Show with David Letterman this afternoon. It was a lot of fun, but also really bizarre. Why?

--The whole experience seems a lot more real on TV than it does live. Maybe this isn't such a profound observation; after all, it's obviously made for a TV audience, and the final show is carefully edited. But for some reason I thought seeing something live would seem more real than seeing it on TV. Not so.

--For example, Letterman sits right on top of his guests. On TV, it doesn't seem that weird, but in person, it's jarring. I tried to imagine having a normal conversation that way, but I think it's impossible. While the stage itself is deceptively small (Paul and the Orchestra are way closer to the desk than I had imagined), there's plenty of space around Dave's desk and the two guest chairs. But the first chair is right next to the desk, and Dave sits at that end of the desk, and then he leans forward pretty much the entire time. The two conversants are often no more than 12 inches apart. Try having a conversation like that sometime. Find an empty room, then sit a foot away from someone. Then lean forward and try to talk like normal people. Tonight's guest, Katie Couric, is obviously used to this kind of thing and handled it all with aplomb. But it's easy to imagine a minor celebrity, like a burgeoning stand-up comedian or one of those dads who saved 11 kids from drowning or whatever, being really really freaked out by how close Dave sits.

--We were told to laugh at every joke like it's the funniest thing we've ever heard. The Late Show employee in charge of telling us this acknowledged that this is a weird and awkward thing to do, but hearing him acknowledge it didn't take away from the weirdness and awkwardness of actually having to do it for an entire hour. Hearing the quick banter between Dave and Paul is really funny, but it's not rolling in the aisles with tears pouring down your cheeks funny. You have to remind yourself, every time something amusing happened, to laugh like hell. It's hard. It was actually hard to appreciate the jokes because we were so busy trying to remember to laugh like hell.

--Harder still: the same staffer told us that we're not allowed to make the ubiquitous "WOOOO!" noise when we're cheering for something. Apparently the microphones pick up the frequency (am I using that word correctly?) too easily and it damages the sound quality. "WOOOO!", of course, along with its cousin, the similarly disallowed "WOO-HOO!" is the default cheering noise for everyone in the world. We were actually told that anyone caught saying "WOOO!" would be ejected.

So you're excited as hell about seeing Letterman, then you start seeing Biff, Allen Coulter, and Paul Fucking Shaffer walk on stage, and all of a sudden you realize you have to invent a brand new cheering noise. This is really, really hard to do. I just laughed and clapped through the monologue, trying to buy myself some time. Finally I settled on "YEEEEEEAH!" as my cheer noise. But holy christ does it start to sound stupid after the 5th time or so. My sister kept looking at me like I was an idiot, but she must have sympathized with me. I think she settled on "HEYYYYYY!".

--The sound for the musical act is pretty awful. I don't blame them for this, since it's a weird theater with low-hanging balconies and, again, it's obviously being performed for the TV cameras. But it was still weird.

I've got one more story about the show, but I want to watch the TV version before I write it because I'm not sure how the scene will be edited. I guess I'll post this story in the comments section or something.