You know what really destroyed Letterman for me? For years Letterman coasted on the same gag — “Look at how much precious network time I’m wasting with comedy bits intended to go nowhere and provide zero entertainment to the audience.”

Now, the thing of it was, we, the loyal Letterman audience, thought we were in on the joke. We laughed along with Dave as he wasted our time, because we were digging that he was also wasting the network’s time. All those “found comedy” moments that yielded nothing but awkward silence and stilted interaction with deli owners.

Now, Letterman has always done this, but earlier on he had a competent writing staff who would actually produce funny stuff that made slogging through the tedium worth it. But as he aged and became more bitter and less funny, he began to rely on the conceit of obviously phoning it in and blatantly wasting everyone’s time more and more, until that became his main mode of “comedy.”

And then came the Norm MacDonald impression of him on “Saturday Night Live.” In a deadly five minute sketch, MacDonald mimicked all of Letterman’s time-wasting unfunny jokes and endless repetitions of them, and his penchant for giggling at himself as he did nothing but waste the network’s time.

And the audience’s time.

Here’s the only clip of it I can find:

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And something in that sketch clicked in me. I finally realized: The joke’s been on me for ten years. I thought I was in on the joke as he wasted the network’s time. But the network was still selling ads, weren’t they?

The only people having their precious time wasted were those still watching Letterman. The network people weren’t watching these long, tedious supposedly funny-because-it’s-not-funny Larry “Bud” Melman appearances. I was.

And I was forcing myself to laugh because I wanted it to be funny. I caught myself doing that at one of Woody Allen’s sad later “comedies” — Shadows and Fog, I think — and realized there, too, that if I had to force laughs to show support, maybe I shouldn’t be supporting Woody Allen anymore.

And so I stopped. I hadn’t been watching Letterman much for years, but I still tuned in on occasion. (The show I tried to stay up to watch had become Conan O’Brien’s.) But now I stopped even bothering to check what guests Letterman might have on, or tune in to an early comedy bit hoping for a laugh.

And so now we see an old, unfunny, cranky old man, who attacks Limbaugh, etc., for stating their political opinions and for being “too smart to believe the crap they say,” even as he turns his non-comedy show into a nightly hour-long advertisement for the Obama Administration.

And speaking of being too smart to believe this crap– Edward R., who tipped me, says that Letterman also casually brought up the “death squads” Paul Bremer had brought with him to Iraq. That’s not in the clip, so I’m not 100% sure he said that, but it sounds par for the course.

And while Letterman always had a hard-on for Johnny Carson — a kinda embarrassing case of hero-worship — the irony is that Letterman is rejecting the Carson model of joke first, joke second, joke last, politics never, and moving into Lenny-Bruce-reading-his-court-transcripts-on-stage mode. While Leno, who didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about Carson, is emulating Carson’s style of giving it to all sides equally.

Incidentally… I don’t think MacDonald intended the impression to be devastating. I think he likes Letterman, as most comics do (or did).

I think he just set out to impersonate him in a friendly manner. The trouble is, by doing so, he revealed just how thin and tired Letterman’s act was.

Meet Obama’s new Culture Warrior:

President Barack Obama has established a staff position in the White House to oversee arts and culture in the Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs under Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser, a White House official confirmed. Kareem Dale, right, a lawyer who last month was named special assistant to the president for disability policy, will hold the new position.

“It’s a big step forward in terms of connecting cultural and government with mainstream administration policy,” Mr. Ivey said in an interview on Friday. …

 Mr. Ivey, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said he expected that the job would mainly involve coordinating the activities of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services “in relation to White House objectives.” 

Okay, where to begin?

1. Yet another distraction for our overwhelmed president.

2. It’s creepy.

3. It’s unnecessary. Our “culture” already is falling over itself to connect with “mainstream administration policy.”  How much adulation from the media does our Narcissist in Chief need? He’s got all the free adulation in the world; now he feels the need for a post crafted specifically to handmaiden more of it?

4. Did I mention it’s creepy? He just admitted that his goal was not to advance “culture” itself — already a dubious proposition — but was in fact, specifically, “a big step forward in terms of connecting cultural and government with mainstream administration policy.” He just announced, in other words, his point was to be a propagandist, to inject “mainstream administration policy” into our “culture.” Like the government-sponsored artists of the 30’s, apparently our new “culture” will be in service not of art but in propagandizing the Obama Administration. 

Add another one to the ever-growing What If Bush Had Done It? file. 

There was a hue and cry over a Clinton era (and Bush era) government program to subsidize TV shows which carried anti-drug messages. Even that was considered a breech and improper marriage of government and media. (I have to say I’m uncomfortable with the precedent myself — look where it’s gone.) 

And now Obama’s Minister of Culture is going to connect “culture” with “mainstream administration policy,” and the NYT welcomes it as if it’s a positive development? 

Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?

They brought on Bill Maher to add some glamor and sexy to their lot.

They would have had on Michael Moore but they didn’t want to pander too obviously.

He did not show up because he was “offended” that each song he sang would be shortened to 65 seconds for the medley.

They can’t even call it terrorism when it’s in a Batman movie, for God’s sake.

I get the feeling Jackman is a conservative, or at least not liberal. And he, apparently, is running this show.

Okay, I guess the Academy feels (as I did) that all of the best picture/oscar sweep hype about TDK was way overblown, and just plain silly, and they’re overreacting against it now.

That, or they just decided there’s no way they’re giving out trophies to a comic book movie.

Again, I didn’t think the film was all-that, but the critics did, and so did the public. Usually Hollywood tosses a bone to its moneymakers in these categories.

Why is it getting shut out of even the consolation prizes of the technical awards?

I don’t think I like it, and it does not reassure me financially.