Thu, July 3, 2003

A few weeks ago, Senator Hillary Clinton made her second appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. The first time was about five days after my mom and I were in his audience, and was the result of a long, arduous campaign by Letterman and his staff. Two days later, Letterman underwent emergency quintuple-bypass heart surgery. This time, the interview seemed a lot less painful (before and after) and Clinton seemed more comfortable. Promoting a book is evidently somewhat less stressful than running for the Senate.

Overall, I was disappointed by one thing. She lacks the intuitive ability to relate to a crowd the way her husband can. She sounds more like a politician because she tends to just talk away. I like Hillary Clinton (because, as Joe will tell you, I'm a dirty hippie liberal and we're all trained to love her no matter what she says or does). I think she's a smart and pragmatic lady and I respect her greatly for her ability to see in her husband (former President Bill Clinton, by the way) those qualities that make him an excellent man and a powerful leader, and to realize that her appreciation for those things outweighs her disappointment in his peccadilloes. I share this with her. But it's a shame she doesn't have the audience interaction thing down quite yet. There were some moments when she would have benefited by pausing to let her message sink in (and leave time for applause). Particularly when Dave rather insightfully asked her if it was fair to blame the economy entirely on President Bush. He posited that 9/11 and the cyclical nature of markets probably contributed, and she astutely observed that those factors of course come into play, but an administration can take steps to make the best of it or just exacerbate the horror as the Bushies have. She kept steaming forward, whereas if she'd paused, I bet the audience would have heard her and applauded. (I did anyway.)

Apart from it's freight-train drive, the interview was insightful and entertaining. Dave makes himself out to be a bourgeois boob, but when the chips are down he can ask some very intelligent questions. (You should have seen him rip into Christie Todd Whitman a few nights later. I've been told that Letterman is generally right-leaning, but it sure didn't seem like it that night. Maybe he's an environmentalist conservative, if there is such a thing.) Clinton was relatively at ease (for her, it's a sliding scale that starts at 'panicked' and works its way down to merely 'jittery') and managed to be humorous. One of her choice lines came when Dave asked her if it bothered her that late-night humorists, like himself, continue to make jokes at her husband's expense. Clinton replied, "Part of the reason I came on this show is I didn't know you did." I'm not sure if this was intentionally winking at the key point of gossip controversy in her book, but it sure seems like it. One of the claims in Living History that has drawn a great deal of incredulity is Clinton's assertion that she didn't know or didn't believe the Lewinsky rumors until the president admitted them to her right before going on TV to admit them to the world. Maybe I'm giving her too much credit, but it seems like making fun of her ability to be oblivious to such obvious facts as late-night talk show hosts making jokes about Bill Clinton is a wry joke at the expense of that controversy.

That same night, Letterman aired another of his regular "Dr. Phil's Words of Wisdom" features. (For the uninitiated, this is where the Late Show takes a few words from Phil McGraw's afternoon talkie Dr. Phil completely out of context, making Dr. Phil look foolish. McGraw is good humored about it, and sometimes mentions it on his show.) It's a hilarious segment and sometimes it's funniest when you can tell what the obvious context would have been but Dave still pretends like it's not. This time, Dr. Phil's statement was, sternly, "Call your wife a bitch." In Dr. Phil's southern drawl it was twenty times as funny as it reads above. I think they've finally eclipsed his belligerent proclamation, "I've had a vasectomy, and I've had it reversed!" as the best "Words of Wisdom" segment ever.

It's common late-night practice that the guest segments all come in the second half hour of the program. These last few months, though, I've been increasingly delighted by what Letterman packs into the first 30. The show seems finally to have collected an adequate arsenal of regular segments like playing games next door at Rupert Jee's Hello Deli, sending stage manager Biff Henderson out with a megaphone or giving the audience a video quiz, and then they add to these with on-stage segments like "Is This Anything?" and "Will It Float?" Plus the added surprise video clips in the style of "Dr. Phil's Words of Wisdom." Sometimes they're fake ads, other times clips from Martha, Inc. the CBS movie-of-the-week starring Cybill Shepherd. Sometimes they're part of a more recurring segment like "George W. Bush Joke That's Not Really A Joke." In any case, they've spawned a new catchphrase that I (for obvious reasons) adore: When Letterman pretends that he saw these clips on TV at home ("My satellite gets that Al Jazeera," he professes), he says of the clip that he "TiVo'd it, taped it, and brought it in." At first, Paul was the only one working to make this into a catchphrase, but now Letterman is fully on board, too.

Also, in the 30-second bit the show airs between commercials during the penultimate ad break, they aired another in the "Dwight, The Troubled Teen" series. They're still using Dwight #2, and he's good, but I miss the original Dwight. There's a scene in Sleepless In Seattle where Tom Hanks (I can no longer look at his name without chanting "Otm Shank!" in Apu Nahasapeemapetilan's singsong Indian voice) is tucking in his son. So, Tom Hanks is telling the boy goodnight and the kid's mom has died, which is sad but it sort of sets up the whole premise of the movie. In one of the more poignant moments of the film (okay, Nora Ephron is pretty bad, but this was before she got just plain awful, and there are some good scenes in Sleepless In Seattle), the son says "Dad, I'm starting to forget her." I'm starting to forget the original Dwight.

(By the way, the practice of commenting parenthetically to the point of degrading the integrity of the original sentence is fully intentional. I'm sure it probably muddies my points, but as far as I'm concerned it's hilarious! If I can sneak four extra rants into my original rant by hiding them in parentheses, then by gawd I'm gonna! So, you'll just have to deal with it.)

THE LATEST FROM POOP READING:

© onebee · all rights reserved