When I was a kid, I always watched Letterman with my dad at night for, yeah, not the whole

thing, but you catch the opening monologue and maybe the first guest, a couple of little

stick bits that would go in between.

And in that opening monologue, some of the jokes would hit and some of them wouldn't.

And if they didn't, Letterman always said a great job is just playing it off and making

the failure of the joke into a joke in and of itself.

There's always one joke that would really work and you could tell, all right, that's where

this audience is.

Maybe you got a couple of buses of people from Northern Iowa who are in town and you

can't really predict what they're going to like, but they liked that one.

And you could see Letterman make a mental note of that and then you'd go and do the other

stuff, the interviews and the guests and all of that.

And if things started to lull, he would always find a way to steer it back around to that

running joke and everyone would be like, Oh, that's right.

We're having fun here.

That's what we're doing.

That's, that's right.

That's kind of what we're laughing about tonight and it was really effective.

And I remember making a mental note of that with my dad and he and I processing that whole

strategy.

I don't know if it was on purpose or not, but that's kind of the same formula we go with

here, I guess.

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