Name: Staff Favorite Moments: Talent Coordinator Ryan Williams | Letterman
Uploaded: 2023-11-14T16:00:42.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Staff Favorite Moments: Talent Coordinator Ryan Williams | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Staff Favorite Moments: Talent Coordinator Ryan Williams | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-14. Transcript available.

Hi, my name is Ryan Williams. I worked at The Late Show first as an intern and
then a talent
coordinator and a stand-up comedy booker. One of the earliest bits I can
remember really loving on
the show there was a guy named Manny the Hippie. Dave would ask Manny the Hippie
whether something
was good or bad and Manny's way of ranking it was it was either dank or it was
schwag and I had no
idea that those were like drug references or anything like that at the time and
I was like
oh this is this is a cool vibe these two have. You like beer Manny? Oh I like
dank beer. Dank?
What is dank beer? Dank beer is good beer. So so dank is an adjective? It modifies
beer? Dank means
good? Yeah. Right and what is bad then if dank is good? Swag. What about a
Volvo? Volvo's are good
but did you know if you rear end them hard enough? No we're playing dank or
schwag. This ain't consumer
digest. It depends. We're playing dank or swag here. It depends. What year? I
don't know what year.
1995. Diggity. Pretty nice.
I had one of the best jobs any kid fresh out of college could have which was to
travel all over
the country holding auditions for stupid pet tricks and stupid human tricks.
Before YouTube this was
really one of the major ways of finding people. The pet trick that I think is
undoubtedly one of the best
ever. I think the dog's name was Bailey. It would play dead. Play dead.
That was good. Play dead. Oh man. So I remember one time a guy sent in VHS tape
of him putting his hand
in a cotton candy machine until his hand was all covered in cotton candy. The
guy was bald so as I'm
watching this clip all I can think about is like well this would be so much
better if this guy stuck his
bald head in the cotton candy machine and I think he only got maybe first-degree
burns on the sides of his head.
There he is.
There was another sort of thing like that where a guy stuck a fork in his nose.
If you're going to stick
a fork in your nose you better do something with a fork. So I had him put a
plate of spaghetti and then
feed his wife. Yeah.
There was a guy who on his skateboard jumped a U-Haul truck. Probably pretty
stupidly we reached
out to him and asked him to recreate the stunt there and they pulled off the
stunt and I think that was by the grace of God more than anything. Somebody
should have died doing that because nobody knew what they were doing.
I think that this was when I was actually interviewing for the internship. They
were doing something they
had never done before which was do a live camera move from the subway station
across the street in
through the back doors of the Ed Sullivan Theater following the Beastie Boys.
Here's the Beastie Boys
coming up out of the subway and it looks amazing. So that was sort of the first
taste of you know seeing
TV being made right in front of you.
My proudest moment probably working at Late Show there was a dog in Chile named
Carrie and Carrie and
her owner danced the merengue. It just so happened that they were on the show
the same day that Bill Clinton
was there for the Clinton Global Initiative. I remember very clearly saying
President Clinton
I'd love to introduce you to Jose Fuentes and Carrie the merengue dancing dog
and the president got
down and shook the dog's hand and patted it on its head. One went on to dance a
merengue on the stage
of the Ed Sullivan Theater and the other one you know on his way to the CGI
initiative.
Famously Sully Sullenberger landed a plane on the Hudson River and shortly
after that Steve Martin was
coming on the show and I got cast in this sketch for the show told I'm going to
be standing on an airplane
wing. Steve was going to sort of lightly nudge me with his arm and I was going
to fall off in the
moment of the sketch where in my head I was supposed to fall but nobody had
really touched me so I just
kind of pitched myself forward without anybody contacting me and you can see or
hear Dave kind
of go huh as just this dumbass timbers off the the wing after not being touched
by anyone have you seen
this before no I have not oh there it is look at that that's unbelievable that
shot one this moment
I was freaking out yeah you you were freaking out yeah let's see that looks
like this celebrity sub
where's the vip rescue boat oh wait oh that's too bad oh I didn't get a light
vest oh thank you
excuse me excuse me where's the vip rescue boy hey you want to buy a light vest
oh well there goes 20
buck one thing that is in my head to this day is the martin short song pull my
lever in the voting
booth and just every time he would come on the show and just the level of
dedication and wanting to
just do something really fun so let's unite all of us and take our pants off
all together
in the voting booth you couldn't flip my switch by the ballot box i can scratch
your act we can bring
it on life's too short too big and so let's just keep pumping just like buffers
ticker in the voting booth
53rd street was great because for whatever reason the mayor's office let us use
it as a playground
and it was everything from bringing in literal tons and tons and tons of dirt
to build a dirt bike
ramp to one of my favorites was we had a guy on his roller blades had little spines
that stuck out
that would hit these items percussively as he scooted along it wasn't like
impressive fireworks
explosion just a cute little moment
there's a gentleman from australia who was the master of making hand shadow
puppets
i see skies of blue and clouds of white the bright blessed day the dogs say
goodnight
and i think to myself
one thing dave would always say is that he wanted to talk to people who had
actually done something so
whenever someone actually did something and it was a big story you try to get
that person to do the
show whether it was you know a woman who got bitten by a fox or whether it was
a guy who witnessed another
person fall on the subway platform and he threw themselves over top of him donald
trump actually
hijacked the subway hero before we could get to him we're thinking like okay
after donald's done
with him he's just going to let him go and then we can talk to him nope they
all load into big black
suvs and drive all the way back uptown so we all hop into cabs and it's
literally like follow those
cars as we're going up the west side highway following donald trump's motorcade
just like what
what is this job so they was like yo you guys got to wait till we kill the
power that took another
20 minutes meantime i'm got this guy he's pushing me my head is hitting thing
but you know i was like
please sir you got to stay still so what i did i struck a conversation with him
and that kept him easy
so are you from the area the one human interest gets that was the weirdest jack
the set who billed
himself as a sock puppet expert a little bit unexpected like the guy looked
pretty grizzled
like he was an old ranch hand or something do you have a lot of kids in the
family grandkids and stuff
like that oh no no no i'm looking now slide your hand into it look at that okay
give me your other
stop that stop that what's the matter with you i've told you a hundred times
now you got a little teeth in
there okay yeah hi everybody hi towards the end of my time at late show i had
the great privilege of
working as part of a team booking stand-up comedians for the show one of the
stand-up comedy debuts that
i'm the proudest that we put on the show was michael che che was booked in the
midst of hurricane sandy
so on very short notice we were like now's the time like we've got a spot for
you if you can make it
and explaining that to his uh representative and they're like well the problem
is is he lives in
jersey city and he doesn't have power or phone like i can't get in touch with
him you just have
to kind of hold your breath and hope that it's going to work out and i think he
had to basically
have people get into the car with him because they were only allowing people
who had uh multiples in
the car to use any of the bridges or tunnels at the time he was somebody who uh
i think had some
hitchhikers in his limo to and from the show this is really cool to do man you
know because i was never
really a good student in school you know i was always bad i used to cut class a
lot you know i had
a teacher tell me in the seventh grade i'd never amount to nothing and i never
forgot that as long
as i live and i seen her recently too in a supermarket by herself buying like
40 cans of cat food
and i stopped there too i was like hey miss conroy remember you told me i'd
never amount to nothing
and she was like yes and i looked dead in the face and i was like lucky guess i
remember one of the
best performances we had on the show and jay-z and eminem performed together on
the roof got to go up
and see two of the greatest rappers of all time perform like one of the most
incredible venues
how's it going to ever get any better than this like what is a cooler moment
shannon ice and the toy demos were in my mind the most important things that
happened every year
the best toy we ever had wasn't really a toy a cupcake car which what really it
was was something
somebody had built for burning man and then as soon as dave gets into the thing
he just gets in it and
then his thing is he's going to repeatedly smash it into the christmas tree
again and again and again
to either get it to break or get the christmas tree to break that was a moment
where it was just
like this is so funny to watch but this could be so bad well if you buy it it
comes with a helmet that reads
jamie oliver was coming on and he was going to be cooking with tom cruise and i
remember that i had got my
version of like dressed up jamie oliver uh told me that i looked like one of
the strokes and i thought
this is perfect like it was at the ideal time in the the early 2000s were to be
compared to one of
the strokes was what every you know 20 something skinny white guy was going for
cooking off
oh my gosh who who needs a colonic irrigation when you go there my lord okay
one day we got a phone call i think the first one was ventriloquist week where
dave said he wanted to
have a week of just ventriloquists on the show and then a drum solo week i
think the best of all
of them probably was elvis week at least for me and that was the one where i
had sort of the most
hands-on kind of curating of all of it after elvis week i got word that dave
was going to call
me in the office and thank me for elvis week and got a phone call in the chat
about how much he enjoyed
it and how each one of the performers he really liked how the concept went you
know from the beginning of elvis to
the elvis at the end and it wasn't just you know the same white leisure suit elvis
every night
that made me feel good and like i had mission accomplished all this week was a
success
my job at letterman was basically weird you know we were the human interest
department but it was
really just the weird