The Top Ten was one of the few comedy bits that Dave never discarded over the run of both late-night shows. It became what the show was best known for. In the Late Night years the list was read only by Dave. When the show moved to CBS, politicians, surprise guests, and even animated characters occasionally delivered the Top Ten. 

It was a simple concept. Pick a topic and have the eight or so writers come up with ten jokes. Turns out it wasn’t that simple. Coming up with those ten jokes took all day and all hands on deck. Sometimes someone outside of the writing staff even landed a joke on the list. One of the perks of working at Worldwide Pants was that anyone on the staff could submit jokes for the Top Ten. When Jill Goodwin started as the executive producers’ assistant, she got a joke on the Top Ten. A few years later, she graduated to full-time writer on the show.

Jill Goodwin: Around May 2006, while I was working as Barbara and Jude’s assistant, I got a joke on a Top Ten. It was: “Gas is so expensive Britney Spears’s baby is driving a Prius.” I don’t remember what the story was, but that was one of my earliest. It was really exciting when you could go home and watch the show and tell people, “That was my joke.” 

Jeremy Weiner: We would always get together in the morning and come up with a topic in the room. We tried to keep it as topical as possible. My favorites were the ones that were silly or random, like the top ten words that kind of sound like “peas.” I remember pitching that the final Top Ten should be a sequel to that—top ten other words that kind of sound like “peas.” 

Joe Grossman: I wrote thousands and thousand of Top Ten jokes through the years. We would pitch topics in the morning. The head writers would pick a topic that they hoped Dave would go for. Then, depending on how busy you were with other things, you would sit there and try to write Top Ten jokes. 

Jeremy Weiner: Once we got the topic, it was just grinding it out and getting as many jokes as possible. You would work on as many versions as possible. There were days when maybe I wrote upwards of as many as fifty jokes for a topic. Then you wait with bated breath to see if you got on the list at the end of the day.

Joe Grossman: I might write anywhere from twenty to forty jokes on a typical day. I think I once had to write ninety jokes because I was the only writer who wasn’t busy with other stuff that day.

Lee Ellenberg: There were days, because you are just writing Top Tens, you could write a hundred jokes by yourself. I got progressively lazy with each pass. I think by the end I would be typing random words together.

Jill Goodwin: I loved writing the Top Ten because I like short jokes. I like punchy and punny. It was something that was, after a while, easy to crank out. I never felt that my tenth pass was gonna be better than my first pass. Do you want to go back and read the first pass again? You knew what Dave’s favorite references were. If it made Dave chuckle, that was the best part. All day you are kind of chasing that.

Lee Ellenberg: That was what I loved about working on a show that you do every day. When the time hits 4:30 the camera starts rolling. I loved having that deadline. Comedy writers can debate about what is funny till the end of time, but having that hard deadline every day just was the universe’s way of saying everyone has to shut up now. 

Joe Grossman: On a bad day you would have to do pass after pass after pass. It was rare that after your third page of jokes you are gonna come up with your best stuff. Then sometimes at five minutes till showtime you would hear that Dave just killed number four, so everyone scrambles to try to come up with the best stuff you can because he is gonna do the list in fifteen minutes. So while Dave is doing the monologue, we’re still writing jokes.

Jeremy Weiner: The craziest moments were when during the show you get a call and they say, “Dave doesn’t like the list; we are gonna write one right now.” We’d be in the conference room pitching ideas to the head writers over the phone as they are typing them up to get them out in the next two minutes.

Lee Ellenberg: It really was a process that continued throughout the day. We just kept writing pass after pass. There would be changes and writing up until showtime. There were many times where Dave would look at the completed product and say, “No.” We would have to write a new one in five minutes. I always loved those the best. We did it in no time at all. So it was amusing to me that we would spend six hours on the first one and fifteen minutes on the new one.

Jeremy Weiner: The ones we sort of cranked out turned out to be fun and exciting—flying by the seat of your pants. When you spend all day working on it, sometimes it makes it better and sometimes not.

Jill Goodwin: While the show was taping the writers would sit around in the conference room and eat dinner together. If you would get a little chuckle out of one of the writers, they might say, “Whose was that?” You might feel good about yourself, but it was a tough room to get a laugh out of. Mostly it was groans. The fun part was to write something that was super weird.

Eddie Valk: I did hidden camera Top Ten Lists that we recorded on the street. I would be dressed in some sort of costume—Elvis, Santa, a horse. We would film them on a Friday when the show wasn’t in production. We would go on the streets of New York and set up a hidden camera in advance. I would have lines that were sent to me from a writer and an assistant director. There were twenty lines I would have to say to different people. It was so crazy to see how many people in New York could care less.

Lee Ellenberg: A lot of times the Top Ten was a promotional thing. If it was for a movie, those were pitched to us. For The Transformers, they had asked us to do it, we wrote a list, and they voiced it. They got Optimus Prime to do it and animated it themselves. 

Joe Grossman: The celebrity Top Tens were always difficult because they had to be approved not just by the head writer, producers, and Dave, but the celebrity and usually a publicist who saw the jokes before the celebrity. You just knew that so much good stuff was gonna be killed by one of those people. That is just part of the job. For the most part, we felt that the celebrity Top Ten Lists were not the best ones. It makes for a good viral video, but the jokes don’t usually hold up as well.

Eddie Valk: I would be the stage manager for Dave’s camera. I would be telling Dave when he was back on camera. I was the safety valve for Dave. The other stage manager, Frank, was next to the camera where the Top Ten presenters were. He would cue them when to step forward, when to speak, when to say their line.

Jeremy Weiner: Rob Burnett [executive producer] at one point said number six needed to be a really strong joke because that is where the turn was on the graphics page, so you needed a big laugh.

Lee Ellenberg: The funniest entry was always at number two. The second-funniest one was at number six, because you wanted the laugh to cover the page turn. That is when we wiped the screen. For the number one, we usually picked the shortest joke. You wanted something punchy that the band can kick in and take us out of the segment.

Bill Scheft: The third-funniest joke is at number ten. The funniest one is number two. Number one is a throwaway, but Dave and I disagree about that. The second-funniest one had to be at number six, because that is when you turned the Chyron on the old show. So you had to have something that would carry over when they cleared the screen. Even though that technology was not used at CBS, we were still thinking that way. We started to put the audience callback joke at the number-six slot.

Lee Ellenberg: In later years, we did that number-six audience joke almost every night. Bill Scheft or the head writer wrote number six because they were out there for Dave’s Q&A session before the show. I understood it logically, because it got the audience going. As a viewer when I was younger, it was kind of cool that you weren’t in on the inside joke. It made it seem like it was just as much fun to be in the audience as it seemed to be.

Jay Johnson: Dave always did a short audience Q&A before every show that would typically last three to five minutes. I think we always recognized that he was taking ordinary questions and creating really fascinating answers to them. He is a great storyteller. We always admired what he was doing with the Q&A. 

Jerry Foley: It is a reminder for all of us that the show starts well before the cameras are recording. It became a very important part of our day. When he went out and did that warm-up, you were aware that those callbacks could be part of his monologue or at any time throughout the whole evening.

Bill Scheft: For years Dave’s warm-up was ninety seconds every night. But for some reason when Alan Kalter started doing the warm-up, Dave felt like he could talk with the audience much longer. He would stay out there maybe ten minutes—it didn’t matter anymore when the show started. I think the longest he stayed out there was fifteen minutes, just yacking with them. 

Jay Johnson: In the final year of the show, we ended up shooting the Q&A with our studio crew, since our camera operators were already in place to do the show. We recorded all those camera angles, and Walter Kim and I would edit them into a Q&A piece for digital content. As we got closer to the end of the show, Dave started going longer and longer with the Q&A’s. I think he was really enjoying it. He was probably realizing he was going to miss it. Knowing that the end was coming, he was just kind of soaking it in. People loved it, because they were seeing Dave in a way that they hadn’t seen before on broadcast. 

Jerry Foley: No script, no TelePrompter, no briefing from Dave that he is likely to do this or say that. It was one of the things that I have come to appreciate as Dave is deconstructed. He was out there without a net. It made it difficult, but exhilarating, because we all had this tremendous creative autonomy. We weren’t locked into a script. We could pivot and change direction with him.

Bill Scheft: I was always out there for the Q&A. We started adding that joke to the Top Ten in the last year or so. We went down to the stage with ten entries, but Matt Roberts and I would always try to put something in from the Q&A. It would be something that the audience would get. We stumbled on it by accident, and I said to Dave that we should do it every night. He would do the Top Ten in Act 2. Matt or I would point to six on the card, which was the new entry that Dave had not seen. He would either OK it, change it, or add something new. 

Jerry Foley: In the warm-up, we would create a little narrative, and it was familiar what was likely to happen. On occasion you could motivate him to go back to someone he spoke to in the audience. It was challenging and it didn’t always work, but Dave was really dedicated to having a conversation with the camera and the audience. You just can’t do that if you are a slave to a script. Yes, he had introductions on cue cards, but he really made it as difficult as he could for himself in pursuit of the conversation, and he certainly succeeded more than he failed.

Bill Scheft: We could add a joke because we had so much more to work with, rather than a minute and a half of someone asking him for a canned ham. That is why we could put them in every night. He loved it. 

Lee Ellenberg: I think the only thing was when it started to be every day I wondered, “Are we doing it just to do it?” They would find a way to shoehorn it into the Top Ten. Then you have to retype Dave’s card and get it to graphics for them to put in the new entry. Nothing is easy on a talk show. Even the slightest change sends a half a dozen people scurrying. 

Joe Grossman: The Q&A was not miked, so we could barely hear it in the conference room. It was something the audience would recognize and get a laugh whether it was funny or not. I think a lot of the writers thought it would have been nice to put an actual joke in there instead of something the audience said, but that’s OK.

Photo courtesy of Rick Scheckman.

Bill Scheft: The longest single laugh of the show was during a Top Ten in February 2012. It was the thirtieth anniversary of the show in late night, and we did the longest-tenured staffers. Jude was number seven, and it was “Things I have always wanted to say to Dave.” Jude said, “I refuse to be berated like this. Go fuck yourself,” and the place went crazy. [See photo above.]

Jeremy Weiner: I always tell people that I wrote number seven. Whenever they ask—number seven was mine.