A Late Night Memory of Pure Television
Dec 6th, 2007 by Alex
A recent comment about a snowball brought back a memory. When I was younger and on holiday break I used to watch David Letterman. I didn’t understand a lot of the political humor at that time or get all of the jokes, but it was still entertaining to watch the celebrity interviews and the banter between Letterman and Paul Shaffer.
Some of my favorite memories of that show occurred in winter. Letterman would be in the middle of a segment or interviewing someone and he’d reach under his desk and retrieve a cardboard box full of snowballs. No telling how they kept those things from melting, but he’d reach in, grab a snowball, then hurl it at Paul. He’d grab another a throw it off into house right. Another into the band shell and another off into house left. Sometimes the guest he was interviewing would get in on it too. And then he’d get back on as if nothing had happened. After a commercial break or two he’d get back into the box and start winging snowballs around again. And so it went until the box was empty.
I don’t know whether late night television has fallen off lately or if it was never that great to begin with, but there seemed something fun and pure about a late-night host flinging snowballs around the studio.
