Name: F. Lee Bailey on Letterman, May 7, 1984
Uploaded: 2021-06-04T03:02:12.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'F. Lee Bailey on Letterman, May 7, 1984' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-04. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'F. Lee Bailey on Letterman, May 7, 1984' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-04. Transcript available.

thank you gentlemen well i'm very excited about this for some reason people
think that they can
push us around here at late night well believe me we are tired of being the doormats
of network
television and tonight we are striking back we are going to slap a suit on
anyone who even looks
cross-eyed at us and to help us out we have asked one of the real heavy hitters
of the american legal
profession to advise us ladies and gentlemen please welcome mr f lee bailey
first of all let me thank you for coming to our assistance here uh tell us what
a lawsuit is for
people who don't understand i'm not sure myself what constitutes a lawsuit it's
a statement filed
in court saying you've done me wrong you should pay and is there a set of
guidelines by which you can
determine if you're eligible to sue or can anybody sue well anybody can sue for
anything whether you
can get a lawyer to bring the suit is another question i see all right that's
why we've invited
you here tonight i'm going to now tell you some of these circumstances and i
want you
you from all of your years of legal uh studying and practicing of the law
advise us whether or not we
can go ahead and sue fair enough with you certainly first of all let's start
with this damn thing
what the hell is there anything is there any way
isn't that the ugliest looking uh of course i may be getting close to something
i don't want to hear
all right you know if you sue on that one then truth is a defense oh so then i'm
in trouble
and you have to prove malice yeah uh all right now now these are things that
have happened to us
we've been on the air over two years now uh on our second international day we
do these shows where
people are the steve martin of peru and uh so on and so forth and we get them
in here uh people who are
big stars in other countries we featured a man named otto bleehovdi i have his
album right here and otto
build was billed as the kenny rogers of norway and in fact right back here on
the liner notes it says
yeah sure you betcha otto bleehovdi's norwegian all right now uh lee i want you
to take a look at some
videotape from that night and then we'll discuss the problem this is otto bleehovdi
the kenny rogers
of norway now now how did you how did you get to be known as the kenny rogers
of norway oh
just singing around now uh you're from norway
now from wisconsin no you're from wisconsin now but but you uh you were born in
norway
no no you're born in wisconsin i was born in wisconsin but your your family are
of norwegian
heritage yeah okay okay that's exhibit number one do we have a suit against
this guy for what
well he said he was the uh the kenny rogers of norway we booked him on the show
i was disappointed
millions of american tv viewers were disappointed yeah i think we should sue it
once i i will refer this
case to marvin mitchelson but do we have any actual grounds for a suit here if
he hadn't told you the
truth on the air you probably could have nailed him for millions oh really yeah
but since he came clean
there through sharp interrogation you smoked it out
sharp interrogation all right
so otto bleehovdi is probably we can't go after him i'd drop that okay we're
going to drop this
all right he'll be able to sleep a little easier tonight won't he
all right now i don't mean to suggest there aren't lawyers who wouldn't sue him
no but no
i understand i understand now uh on another night we had uh one week we had
what we thought was the
world's largest vase this man who was the wrestling coach in iowa uh had
claimed he had the world's
largest base now we heard from a canadian who said that his vase was the world's
largest base so
uh we brought in a voice stress analyst to the studio and with harold nichols
the man who claimed
to own the world's largest vase sitting right here we called the canadian so
again look at the videotape
and lee if you will tell us if you think the other canes got the uh um the
better vase all right sir
first of all i understand you own the world's largest vase well we hope it's
the world's largest vase all
right and uh how high how tall is this vase it is uh seven foot five inches
tall seven foot five all
right how tall is yours i think it's six eight and a half six eight and a half
well all right uh
okay now clearly his vase was not the world's largest base and also is there
anything we can sue over
that haircut well the haircut for sure who was on the polygraph the canadian no
no yeah his
voice was yeah that's right that's right that was my voice dress that was a
polygraph and what it was
was lying okay oh really well he didn't believe he was telling the truth the
problem is used the word
largest yeah he said his was taller the only way to find out who's his largest
to fill them both
with water and pour it into a container so again we're dealing so i think he snuck
away with
clever lawyering yeah however i will refer this suit to william kunstler he'll
handle that
but give me one one final opinion here uh let it go or can we move on this i
think
uh operating on a contingent fee which is a third of the outcome uh most
lawyers a third a third we
take a third sometimes a half yeah and in this case that would be the coffee
without the sugar yeah
i don't think economic feasibility is with us okay all right harold nichols
gets off the hook all right
don't worry we got some big ones coming up uh lee we have to do a commercial
but we got plenty more
stuff here to sue uh we'll something in the commercial we can see perhaps you
never and we'll go through the
audience and find somebody that rubs us the wrong way and uh well there are
people out there that are
guilty of all kinds of things we're just showing up here tonight i think you
could get them on something
we we we have to go away we'll be right back
thank you very much welcome back to the program tonight is lawsuit night and f
lee bailey is here
speaking of lawsuits what was your most memorable the one that gave you the
most satisfaction that you
won probably be one that you won well you do like to win um the trial of
captain ernest medina which
was tough it really had the honor of the country and the armed forces at stake
but i liked it best because
the system worked the way it was supposed to there was no nonsense is it is it
fair for me to ask you
what the biggest cash settlement you were involved in either way well we're
hoping to see it settle we
had a verdict here in new york of seven million one hundred thousand for an air
crash case doctor and
although it'll get trimmed down i think it'll be substantial yeah when somebody
hears that that kind
of money has been awarded one way or the other do people always pay up or is it
just you get what you can
the airline in question has resisted paying up until they exhaust their appellate
rights yeah yes all
right okay let's get back to the important stuff um
all right so far we don't have a suit against uh the kenny rogers of norway
got out with the skin of his teeth there and we don't have a suit against dr
harold nichols who
claims to own the world's largest base and as you pointed out it looked like
the guy on the phone
may not have believed he wasn't doing too well all right that was with the uh
the the polygraph now
uh this is very recently this was last week uh let me show you a tape this was
uh the end of last
tuesday's show i'm announcing the guests upcoming for the following day which
would have been uh wednesday
so so take a look at this uh mr bailey and again we'll come back to you now
tomorrow mayor kotsch will
be here larry holmes will be here kitchen of tomorrow fastest grocery bagger
i think i see the problem did you see what happened there now we mentioned i
think maybe larry didn't
show larry holmes did not show up the next day we called uh about 10 o'clock
that morning to find out
what larry wanted to talk about and we heard from the person on the other end
of the phone well haven't you
heard larry's not planning to be on your show nobody told us nothing so okay
scheduled to be on the show
doesn't show the unquestionably breach of contract case there i would wait
until william french smith
leaves office and get him to handle it however i do point out that sometimes
now you're not taking
this seriously i'm taking it very seriously you can sue larry for damages okay
i would caution you that
probably he will never be on the show again and sometimes even with the good
case one is slow to
sue an 800-pound gorilla he might not like that yeah if you're suited yeah um
then you would have a
suit for assault and battery he had been on the show a couple of other times
very nice man we were
really looking forward he's the people's champion you know he let down kids of
all ages all over this
country oh no question about it it's a terrible lawsuit and and shut-ins a lot
of shut-ins were
interested you know the shut-ins can't go out to see him fight so they were
really looking forward to
this well what you what you should do is find out where he's fighting next and
attach the gate get
legal process oh boy i like that attach the gate yeah just be very sure be very
sure that larry holmes
never finds out i suggested that everyone here is sworn to secrets i don't
think there's any chance of
that all right and we're going to attach the gate that's a good starting point
now uh can you have
one good case already is uh is there a way we can assign a dollar figure to
this or just say we're
going to attach the gate gate i think you probably are going to have to have an
audience poll to find
out what that was worth and that'd be the basis of your claim well i don't know
if we want to go through
you don't want to go through all that this audience right here obviously thinks
it's a very heavy case
i may wind up taking this myself we like to start we like to start we like to
start all of ours at 1.7
million would that be a fair place well if you like small lawsuits i don't do
nuisance cases myself
all right well you pick a figure we're going to attach the gate plus larry
wouldn't understand
anything less than five million i don't got to get his attention he might just
send you a check
i mean i take it you want a big splashy suit oh yeah we want this to drag on
for weeks and months
i'd be afraid his lawyer would just cut a check and say we don't need the aggravation
well let's
hope so you know nbc has an entire floor full of nothing but dozing lawyers we
want to give
give these guys something to do i have bumped into a few of them yeah yeah like
taking candy from
a baby it's terrible all right okay so we have one case larry holmes for at
least five point five
million that's the bottom line on larry holmes okay now now this one is the one
that really got us
going uh last of february uh this was our second anniversary program and
normally this should have
been a very happy very joyous occasion for all of us on the program we had enlisted
the help and booked
to the show the merchant marine academy choir and and throughout the
celebration at a hotel off central
park they were going to be singing songs and they were going to close the show
our second anniversary
90-minute special with uh they were going to sing hang on sloopie okay they
they took a powder lee and
they never another no show well they showed up and left and let me let me show
you we have some
videotape on this uh look at it closely and then we'll we'll chat a little bit
more about the uh
larry what happened to the merchant marine academy what happened to what
what happened to the choir i don't know what happened to the choir
they're not clean now see see this is larry it's not a riddle
what happened wasn't there earlier a large group of men and women singing yeah
there was
what the hell happened to them i don't know did they leave yes
uh do you have any idea do you have any idea why they left no i have no idea
okay but the point is
they were there they had been performing throughout the night we were getting
ready to go to them the
last seven minutes of the show was them singing the song and they hiked out of
there they ate our food
they danced with the peacock girls they had they i'm sure they were drinking
and yet they they just took
a powder and also lee they said that they were reporting us to the president of
the united states
really yeah well he's not a lawyer so i don't have to worry and he doesn't even
know who his lawyer is
this week um in analyzing this particular case and obviously it's a breach of
contract yeah damages are
terrible i think you'd best make sure before bringing the suit that the fault
was not in your own
security people see watching that i think he may have lost all hundred people
just gone to the wrong
place no no they were there they were ready to go oh yeah yeah yeah yeah all
right well that that just
isn't the kind of fellow i'd want guarding the pentagon no no that's no i'll
give you that i mean but
but but that's not what we're here to we'll ship this one out we'll ship this
to mel bella mel does
well in choir cases but do you think we have a suit in this oh yeah absolutely
i mean you can't walk
off the letterman show without expecting some serious consequences that's right
merchant marine academy
choir all right now give me a dollar figure lee what do we go after here well i
would think the
value of the choir i mean the actual performance is probably two three hundred
dollars but the punitive
damages from this conduct that's right millions oh good another five million
dollars no no three
million three million all right oh boy oh boy we're looking at property in bel
air tonight folks
um okay lee i want to thank you very much for uh taking the trouble to be here
not too fast i didn't
come here exactly to be in your show you know right up the street are a couple
of buildings one says cbs
and the other says abc yeah and they feel that you've been stealing their late
night audience so i
brought with me a written summons and you'll be in the supreme court tomorrow
well it's obviously just a joke
we thank you very much for your help okay next week larry holmes and the
merchant marine academy acquire
to these folks very funny thank you very much
you

F. Lee Bailey on Letterman, May 7, 1984

thank you gentlemen well i'm very excited about this for some reason people
think that they can
push us around here at late night well believe me we are tired of being the doormats
of network
television and tonight we are striking back we are going to slap a suit on
anyone who even looks
cross-eyed at us and to help us out we have asked one of the real heavy hitters
of the american legal
profession to advise us ladies and gentlemen please welcome mr f lee bailey
first of all let me thank you for coming to our assistance here uh tell us what
a lawsuit is for
people who don't understand i'm not sure myself what constitutes a lawsuit it's
a statement filed
in court saying you've done me wrong you should pay and is there a set of
guidelines by which you can
determine if you're eligible to sue or can anybody sue well anybody can sue for
anything whether you
can get a lawyer to bring the suit is another question i see all right that's
why we've invited
you here tonight i'm going to now tell you some of these circumstances and i
want you
you from all of your years of legal uh studying and practicing of the law
advise us whether or not we
can go ahead and sue fair enough with you certainly first of all let's start
with this damn thing
what the hell is there anything is there any way
isn't that the ugliest looking uh of course i may be getting close to something
i don't want to hear
all right you know if you sue on that one then truth is a defense oh so then i'm
in trouble
and you have to prove malice yeah uh all right now now these are things that
have happened to us
we've been on the air over two years now uh on our second international day we
do these shows where
people are the steve martin of peru and uh so on and so forth and we get them
in here uh people who are
big stars in other countries we featured a man named otto bleehovdi i have his
album right here and otto
build was billed as the kenny rogers of norway and in fact right back here on
the liner notes it says
yeah sure you betcha otto bleehovdi's norwegian all right now uh lee i want you
to take a look at some
videotape from that night and then we'll discuss the problem this is otto bleehovdi
the kenny rogers
of norway now now how did you how did you get to be known as the kenny rogers
of norway oh
just singing around now uh you're from norway
now from wisconsin no you're from wisconsin now but but you uh you were born in
norway
no no you're born in wisconsin i was born in wisconsin but your your family are
of norwegian
heritage yeah okay okay that's exhibit number one do we have a suit against
this guy for what
well he said he was the uh the kenny rogers of norway we booked him on the show
i was disappointed
millions of american tv viewers were disappointed yeah i think we should sue it
once i i will refer this
case to marvin mitchelson but do we have any actual grounds for a suit here if
he hadn't told you the
truth on the air you probably could have nailed him for millions oh really yeah
but since he came clean
there through sharp interrogation you smoked it out
sharp interrogation all right
so otto bleehovdi is probably we can't go after him i'd drop that okay we're
going to drop this
all right he'll be able to sleep a little easier tonight won't he
all right now i don't mean to suggest there aren't lawyers who wouldn't sue him
no but no
i understand i understand now uh on another night we had uh one week we had
what we thought was the
world's largest vase this man who was the wrestling coach in iowa uh had
claimed he had the world's
largest base now we heard from a canadian who said that his vase was the world's
largest base so
uh we brought in a voice stress analyst to the studio and with harold nichols
the man who claimed
to own the world's largest vase sitting right here we called the canadian so
again look at the videotape
and lee if you will tell us if you think the other canes got the uh um the
better vase all right sir
first of all i understand you own the world's largest vase well we hope it's
the world's largest vase all
right and uh how high how tall is this vase it is uh seven foot five inches
tall seven foot five all
right how tall is yours i think it's six eight and a half six eight and a half
well all right uh
okay now clearly his vase was not the world's largest base and also is there
anything we can sue over
that haircut well the haircut for sure who was on the polygraph the canadian no
no yeah his
voice was yeah that's right that's right that was my voice dress that was a
polygraph and what it was
was lying okay oh really well he didn't believe he was telling the truth the
problem is used the word
largest yeah he said his was taller the only way to find out who's his largest
to fill them both
with water and pour it into a container so again we're dealing so i think he snuck
away with
clever lawyering yeah however i will refer this suit to william kunstler he'll
handle that
but give me one one final opinion here uh let it go or can we move on this i
think
uh operating on a contingent fee which is a third of the outcome uh most
lawyers a third a third we
take a third sometimes a half yeah and in this case that would be the coffee
without the sugar yeah
i don't think economic feasibility is with us okay all right harold nichols
gets off the hook all right
don't worry we got some big ones coming up uh lee we have to do a commercial
but we got plenty more
stuff here to sue uh we'll something in the commercial we can see perhaps you
never and we'll go through the
audience and find somebody that rubs us the wrong way and uh well there are
people out there that are
guilty of all kinds of things we're just showing up here tonight i think you
could get them on something
we we we have to go away we'll be right back
thank you very much welcome back to the program tonight is lawsuit night and f
lee bailey is here
speaking of lawsuits what was your most memorable the one that gave you the
most satisfaction that you
won probably be one that you won well you do like to win um the trial of
captain ernest medina which
was tough it really had the honor of the country and the armed forces at stake
but i liked it best because
the system worked the way it was supposed to there was no nonsense is it is it
fair for me to ask you
what the biggest cash settlement you were involved in either way well we're
hoping to see it settle we
had a verdict here in new york of seven million one hundred thousand for an air
crash case doctor and
although it'll get trimmed down i think it'll be substantial yeah when somebody
hears that that kind
of money has been awarded one way or the other do people always pay up or is it
just you get what you can
the airline in question has resisted paying up until they exhaust their appellate
rights yeah yes all
right okay let's get back to the important stuff um
all right so far we don't have a suit against uh the kenny rogers of norway
got out with the skin of his teeth there and we don't have a suit against dr
harold nichols who
claims to own the world's largest base and as you pointed out it looked like
the guy on the phone
may not have believed he wasn't doing too well all right that was with the uh
the the polygraph now
uh this is very recently this was last week uh let me show you a tape this was
uh the end of last
tuesday's show i'm announcing the guests upcoming for the following day which
would have been uh wednesday
so so take a look at this uh mr bailey and again we'll come back to you now
tomorrow mayor kotsch will
be here larry holmes will be here kitchen of tomorrow fastest grocery bagger
i think i see the problem did you see what happened there now we mentioned i
think maybe larry didn't
show larry holmes did not show up the next day we called uh about 10 o'clock
that morning to find out
what larry wanted to talk about and we heard from the person on the other end
of the phone well haven't you
heard larry's not planning to be on your show nobody told us nothing so okay
scheduled to be on the show
doesn't show the unquestionably breach of contract case there i would wait
until william french smith
leaves office and get him to handle it however i do point out that sometimes
now you're not taking
this seriously i'm taking it very seriously you can sue larry for damages okay
i would caution you that
probably he will never be on the show again and sometimes even with the good
case one is slow to
sue an 800-pound gorilla he might not like that yeah if you're suited yeah um
then you would have a
suit for assault and battery he had been on the show a couple of other times
very nice man we were
really looking forward he's the people's champion you know he let down kids of
all ages all over this
country oh no question about it it's a terrible lawsuit and and shut-ins a lot
of shut-ins were
interested you know the shut-ins can't go out to see him fight so they were
really looking forward to
this well what you what you should do is find out where he's fighting next and
attach the gate get
legal process oh boy i like that attach the gate yeah just be very sure be very
sure that larry holmes
never finds out i suggested that everyone here is sworn to secrets i don't
think there's any chance of
that all right and we're going to attach the gate that's a good starting point
now uh can you have
one good case already is uh is there a way we can assign a dollar figure to
this or just say we're
going to attach the gate gate i think you probably are going to have to have an
audience poll to find
out what that was worth and that'd be the basis of your claim well i don't know
if we want to go through
you don't want to go through all that this audience right here obviously thinks
it's a very heavy case
i may wind up taking this myself we like to start we like to start we like to
start all of ours at 1.7
million would that be a fair place well if you like small lawsuits i don't do
nuisance cases myself
all right well you pick a figure we're going to attach the gate plus larry
wouldn't understand
anything less than five million i don't got to get his attention he might just
send you a check
i mean i take it you want a big splashy suit oh yeah we want this to drag on
for weeks and months
i'd be afraid his lawyer would just cut a check and say we don't need the aggravation
well let's
hope so you know nbc has an entire floor full of nothing but dozing lawyers we
want to give
give these guys something to do i have bumped into a few of them yeah yeah like
taking candy from
a baby it's terrible all right okay so we have one case larry holmes for at
least five point five
million that's the bottom line on larry holmes okay now now this one is the one
that really got us
going uh last of february uh this was our second anniversary program and
normally this should have
been a very happy very joyous occasion for all of us on the program we had enlisted
the help and booked
to the show the merchant marine academy choir and and throughout the
celebration at a hotel off central
park they were going to be singing songs and they were going to close the show
our second anniversary
90-minute special with uh they were going to sing hang on sloopie okay they
they took a powder lee and
they never another no show well they showed up and left and let me let me show
you we have some
videotape on this uh look at it closely and then we'll we'll chat a little bit
more about the uh
larry what happened to the merchant marine academy what happened to what
what happened to the choir i don't know what happened to the choir
they're not clean now see see this is larry it's not a riddle
what happened wasn't there earlier a large group of men and women singing yeah
there was
what the hell happened to them i don't know did they leave yes
uh do you have any idea do you have any idea why they left no i have no idea
okay but the point is
they were there they had been performing throughout the night we were getting
ready to go to them the
last seven mi