Word: letterman
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...analogy between politics and the late-night talk shows breaks down eventually. When David Letterman returned--his production company having made a deal with striking writers--and late-night leader Jay Leno came back writerless, the stakes were not so high. And the hosts, unlike the candidates, share an agenda: all vocally support the writers. But late night and politics are symbiotic, needing and feeding off each other. And in a way, the talk shows, which returned just in time for primary season, found themselves asking much the same thing as the political world: What happens when you throw...
...Made Us Do It. What do Yahweh, the Buddha and David Letterman have in common? They love them some lists! There's something magical about distilling wisdom into a single gleaming digit, which may be why so many religions use lists, from the Eightfold Path to the 95 Theses to the show-offy 613 laws of the Torah. An essay on morality would have been more nuanced than 10 commandments but harder to remember. And the tablets would have given Moses a hernia...
Bell comes of faithful stock: his parents met at Wheaton College, known as the Evangelical Harvard. But his first ambition was to be David Letterman. ("The birth of irony," he jokes. "The Betamax was a portal to another world.") Next came rock. As a student at Wheaton, he fronted a band that seemed poised to break nationally. When it didn't, he attended Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., and apprenticed at a megachurch before founding Mars Hill just outside Grand Rapids. The town is notoriously well churched, but Bell saw an untapped audience: some were his music fans, others...
Watching Bell there, I found it easy to see his appeal to the young. He delivers stand-up-style monologues, not three-point sermons. Comic riffs alternate with seemingly naive questions--Letterman crossed with NPR'S Ira Glass--until Bell tightens the rhetorical noose and produces tears or thoughtful silence. His stagecraft is legendary. To illustrate a passage from Leviticus on sacrifice, Bell brought on a live goat, which he released--underlining Jesus' role as the last and greatest sin offering--intoning, "The goat has left the building...
...very strange that comedians such as Jay Leno, Dave Letterman and Conan O'Brien are "forced" to air reruns during the TV- and movie-writers strike [Nov. 19]. Didn't they get their start in show biz by writing their own material? I guess they're just too rich now--or too blasé--to go back to their roots. Seems a shame, doesn...