On November 24, 1978, David Letterman walked through those iconic colorful curtains onto the stage of The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson and his entire life changed. His stand-up set inspired Johnny to call Dave over to the couch to chat. Johnny Carson calling a comic over to the couch was the seal of approval in the comedy world. Is there a comparable moment to that in show business today? Would it be like getting a retweet from a Kardashian with a million followers? Seems trite in comparison, doesn’t it? Dave would go from guest to guest host of The Tonight Show to host of his own show, which followed Carson. For Dave, Carson set the standard.

“He created the template for that show and everybody else who is doing a show, myself included, we’re all kind of secretly doing Johnny’s Tonight Show.”

—David Letterman, January 31, 2005, Late Show

Jerry Foley: Johnny Carson was a mantra for several of us when Dave was unsure. What did Johnny do? How would Johnny handle this?

Vincent Favale (CBS Executive of Late Night Programing): Dave grew up watching Carson. He was a small-town guy, just like Dave was. Forget his love as a fan, he gave him a huge break. You get booked to do stand-up on The Tonight Show and you feel you won the lottery. Late Night was produced by Carson. He had total say in what followed him. Dave invented 12:30. It existed in a Tom Snyder way, but not in a comedy way. Late Night couldn’t book the same guests. They couldn’t do a monologue or it had to be abbreviated. 

Bill Scheft (Writer): The directive when he got Late Night was, “Don’t be The Tonight Show.” That is why the monologue was three jokes long. That is why there were no mega-celebrities. Whatever you do, don’t do it like The Tonight Show.

Vincent Favale: He had to have different guests from The Tonight Show, and his band had to be smaller. Dave was fine with all that. 

Michael Barrie (Writer for Carson and Letterman): When Dave was doing Late Night it was a parody of a talk show.

Jim Mulholland (Writer for Carson and Letterman): Letterman didn’t really do a very long monologue in those days. It was sort of a throwaway. He just did a few jokes. He memorized the stuff, as opposed to Carson, who put it on cue cards. Carson had a horizontal board, and he would look at the jokes. He did eighteen, twenty. Letterman did half a dozen

Johnny Carson delivers a Top Ten to Dave when the Late Show was in L.A. Photo courtesy of @Letterman, CBS publicity photo.

Michael Barrie: Carson had a different cue card system than Letterman. Carson had a long easel that was about fifteen-to twenty-feet long. It was in front of him on the floor, and the cue cards would be stapled left to right, maybe eight to ten cue cards, with the jokes more or less written out. Johnny liked to jump around. He was very good at hearing the audience. If he did a topic and the first joke died, he might feel they are not into this topic. So, he wouldn’t want to be locked into three more jokes on that topic. He wasn’t locked into some guy flipping cards, whereas Bob Hope and Letterman had a guy holding stacks of cue cards and flipping them one at a time. If the audience didn’t like a topic, they were stuck with it. Dave would sometimes say, “Go to the next one.” Johnny didn’t have to do that.

Jim Mulholland: We met Dave through The Tonight Show in 1978. Peter Lassally [executive producer at Tonight] said, “You should also write for Letterman.” They were sort of grooming Dave to be the next guy. We went to see him at The Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. Most of his act was interacting with the audience, so we didn’t know how to write for this guy. We met with him and asked if he had any ideas for material. Dave is a very quiet guy. He said, “No, whatever you want to do.” 

Michael Barrie: Dave had a different personality. He was more of a character who was more ironic, offbeat. He liked to talk about himself maybe more than Johnny would in jokes.

Jim Mulholland: They made him the first permanent guest host. We were writing his monologues then. I could never get a handle on what he wanted to do. It wasn’t like he was a monologist. He was more from the Steve Allen school of “Just make it up on the spot” and was good with people. He didn’t last because he got the morning show in 1980. Then the guest host became Joan Rivers.

Bill Scheft: Dave was not topical, he was personality driven. He was very sort of Will Rogers Midwestern. Johnny had it in him too, but he became famous, wealthy, and was doing this long monologue. Johnny loved the monologue; that was his favorite part of his show. The monologue for Dave was something to get through and settle everybody down. Johnny would do the monologue and then do the desk piece, which was all written out. Dave did more conceptual stuff throughout the show. Johnny had seventy-five percent of the writers working on the monologue. At Late Night it was the exact opposite. If you had twelve writers, you only had two or three working on the monologue.

Michael Barrie: Letterman didn’t like long setups. There was a line we wrote about retirement for Dave that went, “Well, it is over, and I wanted to keep doing this until it was sad.” That is a Letterman joke—sort of a sarcastic remark, although that doesn’t quite explain it. I don’t think Johnny would do that one. In the hands of somebody else, it wouldn’t even appear to be a joke.

Jim Mulholland: Dave had a different point of view, and I could never quite get a handle on what it was. With Johnny anything was an open target. It was a little more narrow with Dave. It was a struggle for me to find what topics appealed to him. He seemed to be more interested in the topic than the joke. 

Johnny was peerless in the art of getting out of a joke that bombed. Even Dave was in awe of this.

“The best part about Johnny was when a joke would not go well. He would look at the audience and give them that look like he had just bought them drinks and nobody said thank you.”

—David Letterman, January 31, 2005, Late Show

Michael Barrie: Carson would have fun with bombing. I don’t think he wanted to bomb, but if a joke wasn’t working he would tap on the microphone or go into his soft shoe. He just had fun with it. Most comics don’t have that.

Bill Scheft: Johnny was so good at it, you almost thought maybe he wants this to happen so he can get out of it. As a viewer you started rooting for stuff to bomb. You would see him do the soft shoe. You just would love that. You knew there would be a good joke coming along. 

Michael Barrie: Johnny didn’t want to bomb. He wouldn’t do a sketch where he had to play a character that would build to something. He wanted a series of jokes, like in vaudeville. So he could jump around. Sometimes you would hear Johnny say, “I am in it, and I can’t get out.” That was his worst fear.

Jim Mulholland: Today, you don’t see these late-night guys bomb very often. For one thing, these audiences are so amped up they just applaud when the comic stops talking, whether there is a joke or not. So it is rare to see a comic bomb today. Johnny might tell six jokes in a row that would die. It was more of an honest thing. Today, it is a little more polished. They rehearse the monologue. All of them have that safety net there. Letterman rarely went into the tank. 

Michael Barrie: Letterman was more chagrined when a joke died. Johnny kind of made the audience feel like they were in it with him.

Vincent Favale: Their affection for each other was so apparent over the years. Then they probably bonded over Dave not getting the 11:30 show when Carson retired. Carson wanted Dave to get the show. 

Jim Mulholland: Johnny liked Dave a lot, He wanted him to take over The Tonight Show, but no one ever asked for his opinion.

Vincent Favale: Before Carson died, he was submitting monologue jokes to Dave. It was a secret, and Dave thought it was kind of cool. Johnny was like a little kid.

Jim Mulholland: Sometimes Steve Young would fax a list of jokes back to us and some of Johnny’s jokes would be mixed in with ours. I would say, “Whose jokes are these?” and here it was Johnny Carson’s material. I am sure what happened was he was sitting out at his house in Malibu and was going through the paper and saying, “I could have had some fun with these.” So he started writing them and faxing them to the Late Show. One time we had lunch with Johnny and he said, “I wrote a great joke about Liza Minnelli getting a divorce and Dave didn’t do it.” He sounded like one of the writers. He was pissed off he didn’t get the joke in the show. I said, “Now you know I how I feel.” It was so funny to hear Johnny Carson pitch a joke and not get it in. He did that right up until he died. He wanted to keep his hand in. He was a great joke writer.

Photo courtesy of @letterman, CBS publicity photo.

Johnny Carson died on January 23, 2005. Dave was in reruns the following week, but when he returned on January 31, he aired a tribute episode to his mentor. The entire monologue consisted of jokes Carson had written over the years for the Late Show. Dave’s guests were Peter Lassally and Doc Severinsen. Doc, Tommy Newsom, and Ed Shaughnessy (all members of The Tonight Show Band) played with Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra to perform Johnny’s favorite song, “Here’s That Rainy Day.” It is a beautiful instrumental version of the song that Carson sang with Bette Midler on his penultimate show.