Word: melman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With the mention of this, a double for the former Larry 'Bud' Melman appeared from behind the section dedicated to the culinary arts. He enquired as to my year in school. I replied that I was to be a first-year in Cambridge this fall...
...midst of a televised cross-country tour, the duo are clear successors to veteran Letterman foil Larry ("Bud") Melman -- with one important difference. Melman was a character played by actor Calvert DeForest. Mujibur Rahman, 34, and Sirajul Islam, 39 ("the boys," as Letterman calls them), are real New Yorkers -- and a real problem for their fellow emigres, who have no illusions about what America is laughing...
...late night in September. David Letterman is on CBS, with the same bits he perfected (but maybe didn't patent) on his NBC show: running animals through stupid tricks and Calvert De Forest -- Larry "Bud" Melman to you -- through the humiliation gauntlet. Chevy Chase is on Fox, reprising the Weekend Update routine from his early stint on NBC's Saturday Night Live. So what does that leave for beleaguered NBC and its corporate parent, General Electric? To stick with the lunch-pail charisma of Jay Leno at 11:30. To hope that Conan O'Brien (Dave's 12:30 replacement...
...said of Letterman. "But the reality is . . . he walked out of our marriage." And so NBC picks a fight with flush CBS over comic ideas that were hackneyed when Letterman started using them; call it banalimony. That surely describes the high-level mud wrestling over De Forest's Melman. "If you have an actor who's a bumbler," asks Manhattan attorney Stanley Rothenberg, "do you prevent him from earning his living after this series is over? Do you say he can't go and bumble elsewhere...
...what, anyway, is a comedy character? "There was no Larry 'Bud' Melman character," says Merrill Markoe, Late Night's first head writer. "It was just Calvert being unable to read cue cards particularly well. It was a trait with which he was so consistent that we could call it a character. That was the character: there was no character." As for Stupid Pet Tricks, Markoe dreamed it up for Letterman's NBC 1980 morning show -- which he, not NBC, owns -- and reused it on Late Night. "I came up with a really good sequel to Stupid Pet Tricks," adds Markoe...