Brother Theodore in the "David Letterman Last Giant of Late Night" Book

I think the photo says it all, doesn't it?

My late friend, Theodore Gottlieb, used to say on stage, "Ladies and Gentlemen, it is MY fault, I should have known better..." and that applies to my photo of him.

It's all over the Internet with NO credit to ME, because I didn't know better. I didn't realize the Internet respects no copyright, "shares" everything, and that I was too naive back then to "watermark" the photo with some big ugly letters saying "DO NOT COPY" or "photo by RONALD L. SMITH."

Anyway...

When I heard that some New York Times guy used his connections to get a deal, take time off with the advance money, and wander around interviewing key players (he got to Rich Hall, but not David's first wife), I wondered whether Theodore would figure in the book.

After all, Theodore was one of the eccentrics who David needed when he was just the hipster's "Joe Franklin Show," and couldn't rely on famous names. Theodore was playing the small 13th Street Theater Saturday nights, and unlike oddball Larry "Bud" Melman, was not coddled by having people write for him. When Theodore did the show, he had to prepare his own material, keyed to questions he supplied to Dave.

Sadly, the New York Times guy, who uses words like TROPE (I'm waiting for zeitgeist, underpinning, informed (as in, "his comedy was informed by influences such as...") and the ever-popular paradigm) reduced my legendary friend to ONE paragraph.

In true New York Times and NPR style, the paragraph is freeze-dried by college words (locution, philosophic, cultural) and presented with an impotent and anemic (there you go, more college words) lack of true insight or appreciation.

"Late Night pursued guests who were more on the cultural margins. Brother Theodore, a singular German monologist who delivered enraged rants off_Broadway, regularly brought the energy of performance art to Late Night. Dressed in black and wearing stern expression, he came off as a parody of an intellectual saying very important things. His laments about the culture were epic. The locution of his philosophic tirades echoed that of old Hitler speeches, making him seem the model of the dangers of believing things too deeply."

Uh, yeah. Sure.

This description reminds me of a Bob and Ray bit, in which a politician's speech is analyzed:

"His jeremiad, this threnody, call it what you will, can only be described as an atrabilious amphigory."

It's a little painful to find the Times' expert on comedy mentioning Hitler in reference to a Jewish comedian well known to have survived Dachau while losing the rest of his family to the Holocaust.

Theodore was not a political or topical comedy. His self-defeating comedy ("I am the bride at every funeral...") and his most famous gloomy one liners ("The best thing is not to be born, but who is as lucky as that?") had nothing to do with old Hitler speeches.

But despite the author's insistence that he became a big Dave fan while in college, the publicity surrounding this book is basically, "Hey, Letterman's not a nice guy." The advance publicity hinges on a few fired staffers getting even by offering anecdotes about their difficult boss. I've only gotten up to page 84 (the Theodore page), but who knows, in a while maybe there will be a juicy ex-staffer description of how Dave's tirades echoed that of old Himmler speeches, or Rommel, or Mengele, or given that he's an American, maybe Manson.

(Update: still reading the book, I hit page 119 and the author used ZEITGEIST. I waited for it; I got it. Then on page 137, up came "context informs the meaning of comedy." Verbosity and banality ARE predictable)

(Second update: up to page 161, where the author once again uses TROPE, this time referring to "visual tropes." The book is coming off more and more like a college lecture from somebody determined to make every minor point possible, using every major cliche of vocabulary.)