On the DL

Aside from a brief snapshot of throwing a small can of tomato paste at my mother's head for no obvious reason, most of my earliest memories consist of trying to make people laugh in any way possible. I used the tools that were available to me: my body for standard physical humor -- passing gas through any bodily orifice and variations of "baby fall down" were hoary chestnuts of mirth and merriment -- and my voice for imitations of things I saw and heard. This means that the standard vocal go-to's were pretty typical for a socially awkward skinny white male of a certain age and time -- lines from movies (Caddyshack, Blazing Saddles, the Monty Python catalog), quotes from television (especially Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies, SNL and The Simpsons), and so forth -- and while I'd like to say things have changed from then to now, they really haven't. They really haven't.

As the spark of singular creation is largely absent in me, I've always been drawn to the work of those at the zenith of their professions for any measure of inspiration and imitation, and the big three that have always resonated most strongly to me are the late David Foster Wallace in literature, David Bowie in music, and David Letterman in television comedy. Each of the three Davids offered up a dizzying mastery of a given domain as well as a metacognitive awareness of the edges of the domain that they mastered: DFW with footnotes and non-fiction, Bowie with persona and performance, and Letterman with irony and sarcasm and medium deconstruction. However, as only one of those Davids revolutionized comedy, guess which one I would gravitate to most strongly, to mimic in a callow and shallow fashion?

When I stand up in front of people and lecture or lead discussion or drive inquiry in a class room to play around in the sandbox of ideas, I'm doing the task at hand -- vocal tone, pacing, and other verbal and non-verbal elements -- while also mentally reflecting on the artificiality of the situation I'm in. And like it or not, the lessons of David Letterman -- his braying exaggerated laughter, dead-eyed smiling, spinning cliches into different contexts to wring new life from them -- have informed my presentation style as much as any other influence. In some ways, that's not good; Letterman was known at times to be chilly and remote and an asshole, especially in the early days, and god knows I've been called all those things and worse in my almost twenty years of teaching. 

But at the best of times, it can be entertaining and informative and compelling and inspiring, adding layers of meaning to content and discourse, and those best of times are always what I strive for. Just as it seems crazy that there will be no more new transmissions from the freshly retired David Letterman, I know that my career as a professor has more yesterdays than tomorrows, and his retirement has made me reflect on that point a bit more strongly than I might have wanted. Sure, I've watched good friends and colleagues retire and downshift for years, and I know that with each retirement, I'm getting closer and closer to being that old guy wandering the halls, telling the same jokes and offering the same anecdotes, making people wonder when he'll hang it up already. It's just that this particular retirement, initiated and completed by Letterman with economy and class and sentiment without sentimentality, is just one more thing I'll aim for but never reach. But I'll always have the laughter, and that's the best gift anyone could ever give. Or so I've been told.