Not long after Netflix revealed it’s ordered six episodes of a talk show hosted by David Letterman, the former late night host was a guest on Howard Stern’s show this morning, and if you missed it, you can listen to the entire interview below. Near the beginning, Letterman drops some news when he tells Stern that he’s appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live sometime in September: “Jimmy Kimmel has been very nice to me, and I was on his show,†Letterman says. “And I’m gonna be on it again in October – unless, of course, I drop dead.†(Later in the interview, Letterman reveals this interesting Kimmel trivia: “He’s always smoking weed.â€)
The lengthy chat also covers some of Letterman’s many late night guests, including Joaquin Phoenix (“It was easy. It was batting practiceâ€), Andy Kaufman (“He was always a gentleman to me and always would let me know ‘I’m gonna do A B and C, and don’t get upset when the wrestler hits me’â€), and Stern’s hunch that Rodney Dangerfield wasn’t a big Letterman fan (“He didn’t like coming on,†Letterman admits). Letterman also invited Stern to appear on the upcoming Netflix series, which he’s not worried about at all: “I think it’s gonna be great. And it’ll probably be the last thing I do, so I want it to be great.†While Letterman doesn’t go into much detail about the series, he does look to Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee as inspiration:
God forbid Jerry can’t do his show, Comedians Drinking Coffee in Cars, just give it to me. It’s the only new good idea in the new generation of multiplatform television productions. Here’s what I admire about Jerry – many things to admire about Jerry – but he puts together his little situation comedy and everybody can’t get enough of that. So we think “Goodbye Jerry, thank you, we’ll see you later,†and, you know, he does his standup act. And then he comes back, and he goes to Snap or Crackle or Pop or wherever he goes – and yeah, what is that? Do you get it on your clock radio? I don’t know where it is. And he’s fine that nobody knows where it is, and then he amasses a hundred episodes, and then he goes to Netflix and they say “You know, we’ll give you $500,000,000 for your little drinking coffee show.â€
Letterman also talks about having dinner with Steve Martin, auditioning for Airplane!, and, of course, Trump: “It was an experiment. We put an outsider in the office…well, it hasn’t worked, so just resign. Just resign, we’ll take it a step at a time, and we’ll see what happens after that. But for the time being, we’ve had enough.â€
Here’s the full interview: