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Watching Letterman's strange confession last night, I was reminded of something I'd read earlier this week in Nancy Franklin's scathing review of The Jay Leno Show in the current issue of The New Yorker:
Leno's and the rest of the nighttime comedy shows are bizarrely lacking in women writers. Did a bomb go off and kill all the women comedy writers and leave the men standing? The other night on the Emmy Awards broadcast, the names of the nominees for best writing on a comedy or variety series were read, and, out of eighty-one people, only seven were women. Leno has no women writers on his show. Neither does David Letterman, and neither does Conan O'Brien. Come on.
I'd assumed that late-night comedy was a boy's club, but I was shocked to learn there isn't one female writer working on any of these shows. Letterman didn't betray many details about office life at The Late Show, and, who knows, maybe the program has made real efforts to hire women writers over the years. If so, they haven't been successful. Here's one way to atone for your hinky behavior, Dave: Put your eye for female talent to better use.
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Troy, while I agree with you that Letterman ultimately won over the Late Show's studio audience, the dominant emotion in the crowd (and on my couch) was confusion. The strangest thing about Dave's confession was that in his repetition of the phrase "creepy things," he left it entirely unclear whether he actually believed that he had done any "creepy things." The segment—coming as it did after a monologue packed with bad skunk jokes—was so unexpected and internally incoherent that it was impossible to tell what was supposed to be a laugh line and what wasn't. The crowd, understandably addled by the tragicomic proceedings, perceived Letterman's use of "creepy things" as a running gag, and Dave didn't make any attempt to tamp down the laughter. Yet by the end of the segment, he was asking why everyone was guffawing.
Does Letterman think he committed a serious transgression? The main reason it was hard to tell whether he was taking it seriously—and whether we should take it seriously—is that he stayed mum about how many of his female staffers he'd slept with and when the affairs had taken place. When the Late Show host said that the admission was embarrassing and that he needed to protect his family, the implication was that it was a big deal. When he followed that up with a crack about how it was more embarrassing for the women, it seemed like he was popping a balloon he'd just spent 10 minutes inflating.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 11 a.m.)
No. 9: "Prickly Shark." The prickly shark is an extremely rare shark with dual dorsal fins, and on Tuesday, scientists in Monterey, Calif., captured and displayed one for only the second time ever. A tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium was the shark's home for 15 hours before it flipped over in a "hypnotic trance," according to the Monterey Herald. This signaled to scientists that it was time to return it to the sea.
No. 21: "David Letterman Sarah Palin." Last night, Letterman responded on-air to complaints from Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that he had made "sexually perverted" jokes about "raping" her 14-year-old daughter on his show Tuesday night. (The jokes were a little perverted but they were definitely not about rape.) Letterman's unapologetic rebuttal was a brilliant judo move: "I can't really defend these: They're just jokes." Whether it satisfied Palin remains to be seen, but the controversy has been good for ratings: Letterman has been beating Conan in the numbers since Tuesday.
No. 35: "Amanda Knox pictures." Tomorrow, 21-year-old Amanda Knox takes the stand in Italy to defend herself against charges she killed her British roommate in 2007 while on an exchange program there. Since Knox was charged five months ago, the case—and its attendant sexy details—has captivated Italy. But Timothy Egan in the New York Times notes that the case against Knox "has so many holes in it ... that any fair-minded jury would have thrown it out months ago." The fact that "pictures" is appended to Knox's name suggests many Googlers are subjecting her to their own judgment—namely, whether she's worthy of the nickname bestowed upon her by the foreign press: "Foxy Knoxy."
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