Comedians' Reactions to Letterman Scandal

After October 1, when David Letterman told the story of the alleged attempted extortion involving his affairs with women who worked for him, I wondered how his fellow comedians would react.

This blog from The Huffington Post and this article from the AP tell of what other comedians have been saying about Dave as of the weekend after his confession. It seems most are being easy on him or not talking about it at all. Jay Leno (The Jay Leno Show), Jimmy Fallon (Late Night), Seth Meyers (Saturday Night Live), and Craig Ferguson (The Late Late Show) have made jokes and comments about Dave’s scandal, but none of them were mean about it (towards Dave, that is; some were rightfully mean toward Robert "Joe" Halderman, the alleged blackmailer), which makes me happy.

In the week since Dave’s confession, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert didn’t say a word about Letterman on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, so they're with Conan O’Brien (The Tonight Show) and Jimmy Kimmel (Jimmy Kimmel Live!) in not talking about it, which also makes me happy.

I was very interested to know what Howard Stern thinks about Dave’s scandal.

If you read this article from The Examiner, you would think Howard Stern was hateful, and it almost sounds like Howard was screaming about how horrible Dave is. The article doesn’t misquote Howard, but it takes his statements out of context. If I hadn’t heard Howard myself and if I had only read that article, I would seriously hate Howard, and I’m a fan of Howard.

Since I did hear Howard talking about Dave, I can continue to love Howard (and Dave). As I expected and hoped for from Howard, he was completely honest about his thoughts about the situation. He made it clear that he likes Dave, and credits Letterman for always being supportive of him. He also said that Dave came out with this stuff in a brilliant way, and noted that he's a great communicator. But Howard felt that Dave screwing interns creates a really bad work environment where women feel they have to screw the boss to get ahead and men feel like they can't get ahead because they lack the necessary equipment. He also said if his daughters were taken advantage of as interns like that, he would cut off Dave's winkie. All these things are completely understandable, assuming that his affairs were, in fact with interns (I know Holly Hester came forward as having an affair with Dave while she was an intern), and if other interns and staff members were aware of those affairs at the time, and also assuming that Dave was abusing his position of power in the affairs, which we can't be sure of. I don't feel that Howard was mean-spirited towards Dave at all, as the Examiner article above might imply.

And finally, Dave’s reaction to himself was probably the funniest reaction of all the comedians. On the Monday after the confession, Dave spent almost the whole monologue cracking jokes about himself. He followed this hilarious monologue with another heartfelt statement apologizing to his staff and his wife for hurting them, as well as affirming that he did the right thing in confessing. Of course he ended the string of apologies with another apology to Sarah Palin, because it couldn’t hurt.

Dave has really been handling his scandal well. As both Howard Stern and Steve Martin have said, this scandal really does show us that Dave is human, and as Steve Martin noted, we really weren’t sure of that before.

I think the keep-quiet attitude and the lack of mean-spirited jokes from his fellow comedians show the reigning king of late night the respect that he still deserves, particularly since David Letterman is a victim of a felony.