Looks like nostalgia is breaking out all over late-night this week: SNL’s 50th anniversary special and accompanying music concert are set for the weekend, and just to start things off Monday night: Old Host Week!
Over on The Daily Show, it was the one shining fill-in moment host, John Oliver, coming back to pour historically vandalized tea in the wounds of current (part-time) host Jon Stewart, who was trying to illustrate the roll back to an era—signified by period-appropriate fake mustaches on Stewart—when kids worked in sweatshops and which Donald Trump believes America was at its greatest.
The bit turned into an interruption from Oliver, the native Brit (he got US citizenship long ago), gloating about America’s tilt back toward monarchy based on its current rejection of its “wild teen-years’ experiment with your ridiculous ideas of check and balances.”
And on The Tonight Show, David Letterman, once a favorite guest host and ultimate jilted successor to Johnny Carson, was slapping current host Jimmy Fallon around with tortillas.
How do you want your comedy, folks? Laced with angst about the collapse of democracy or literal slap-schtick? Late-night had both on offer.
The Letterman drop-in during Fallon’s monologue was a true surprise to the show’s live audience, which went legit wild when the biblically bearded but unmistakable Dave emerged from behind the show’s traditional curtain.
And it was a true Letterman reunion because Paul Shaffer and “The World’s Most Dangerous Band,” the house band on Letterman’s breakthrough years as host of NBC’s Late Night, were ensconced in the area usually occupied by Jimmy’s house band, The Roots.
Fallon explained that this ideal replacement was taking place because The Roots have been dispatched this week to serve as accompaniment to SNL’s celebratory weekend.
So how did Letterman get added to the mix? His publicist, Tom Keaney, explained that Jimmy’s production team had asked if Dave could do a “drop-by” on the first night performance of Shaffer and his group as fill-ins and Dave happily accepted.
No specific mention was made of any extra significance, but the visit did ring some resonant echoes of earlier late-night days. Letterman was back in 30 Rock, the building where he starred on Late Night for 11 years in the 80’s and 90’s; he was visiting the exact studio where his idol, Carson, had started his own 30-year run on The Tonight Show; and of course he was on the show that he once thought would be the capstone of his own career, until he was “passed over” (as Dave himself perennially cited it during Passover) for Jay Leno—for the first time since Leno took the reins in 1992.
Obviously, this was no visit aimed to relive any of that, only to have a little fun, with the fun-oriented Fallon. Jimmy and Dave mainly chased laughs based on broad comedy, like creating a viral video consisting of Fallon bouncing next to the unmoving Letterman, who fell into his signature persona, saying, “That was lame.”
Jimmy urged Dave to tell some monologue jokes (notably something Leno has done during visits with Fallon) and Dave pretended to privately read several off cue cards before declaring none worthy of delivering.
That led to Dave asking the audience if anyone had any tortillas. This played a bit like an offbeat idea Letterman might have had in his Late Night days as he was pelted with flying tortillas, a surprising number of which he deftly caught.
It wasn’t dropping watermelons off the roof, but it had a nice throwback feel.
Yes, the entire Letterman visit played in distinct contrast to the more pointed comedy bit on TDS, which, while being broadly funny (Stewart’s mustaches through the years was a pure sight gag), carried with it the rueful observation that the 250-year-old American experiment in democracy is being threatened with eradication.
“What I’m saying is: Don’t fight being a monarchy,” Oliver urged Stewart, “embrace it. Kings get sh*t done. Now is it stuff you want done? Not necessarily. But they do move quick. They taste cumin at lunch and they’ve taken over an entire continent by dinner time. That is how the British rose, Jon. F*ck everyone else. They’re not like us.”
Those lines may have provided anxiety as well as laughs, as is part of the Daily Show charter.
But, presumably, under any regime, Americans will be still allowed to slap each other around with tortillas.
Unless they become unavailable due to 25 percent tariffs on Mexico.
