Name: Pete Hamill on The David Letterman Show, July 8, 1980
Uploaded: 2020-08-05T19:07:02.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Pete Hamill on The David Letterman Show, July 8, 1980' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-08-05. Transcript available. Dave's morning show #12. For Pete.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Pete Hamill on The David Letterman Show, July 8, 1980' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-08-05. Transcript available. Dave's morning show #12. For Pete.

Good morning and welcome to the show. I'm adjusting my socks, ladies and
gentlemen.
Keep your seats if you will. Thank you. My name is David Letterman and we're
happy to have you
here today. Pete Hamill will be with us in this half hour. Also Edie McClurg,
Laudan Wainwright
III. And earlier in the first half hour, I made a reference to I Love Lucy rerun.
And I said
something about something, something, something. And I mentioned Motel 6 and
people just sat
there. Let me ask you this. Now, if I'd said cheap motel, would that have made
any difference?
Apparently no appreciable difference. I appreciate those of you who have just
joining us putting up
with this bit of nonsense, but it's very important to whether or not I continue
in this capacity or
go to heavy equipment school. Our next guest has been a journalist for 20 years.
He's also a
screenwriter, a novelist, and contributing editor to New York Magazine. We're
going to find out what
his favorite episode of I Love Lucy is. Let's welcome Pete Hamill, please.
Mr. Hamill. Pleasure to meet you, sir. Thank you for being here.
Did you hear me make that reference to Lucy and Fred and the...
And the sheep motel?
No, no, no, no. Not the sheep motel. Oh, heavens. Now I've really done it.
No, no, no. Sheep motel. Nonetheless, that's my problem. Nice of you to be with
us this morning.
How are things for you? Are you excited as a journalist about anything like the
conventions
coming to town, the presidential election, politics, anything there?
Well, I think the election is going to be kind of fun. I think of it as the
Larry, Curly,
and Moe election. Who would be who there? Or just pick anyone, I guess.
The odd finger. You know, whoever wins on the bat. I think that part of it is
going to be kind
of fun because they're basically the three guys. The whole country, I think,
feels, "My God,
how can 220 million people labor so mightily to produce three mice?"
You'd think that a country that has done the things this country has done would
produce better
leaders in a way. We haven't, and we're stuck with these three guys.
You might as well sit back and enjoy it. Yeah, I suppose so. But why is that?
Are there other men
who are better qualified who are not interested? Or other women who are better
qualified who are
not interested? Are they doing other things? Are they...?
I think it's basically the process of politics itself ensures a kind of mediocrity
among the guys.
It's just a dismal profession, if you go at it the way most people go, which is
to start from the lowest
level, eating boiled chicken at a million dinners, and hoping that you don't
diet to main on your way
to the district leadership or something. We do... It's interesting, for example,
that Reagan,
a sort of second-rate actor, would become a first-rate politician.
Yeah. It's almost impossible to think of George C. Scott running for president,
who's a great actor.
Right. Or even some of the movie star types like Redford and Newman, because
there's something
frightening about excellence. I think if you get a really mediocre actor, you
figure, "Well, he won't
do anything. Jack Carson will talk to him in the White House and straighten him
out if he does anything
really awful." What would the motivation be for these guys? It can't be money.
I mean,
what makes a guy want to run? Why would... I think that it always is power.
People want power
either to do things or to have a sense of superiority over other people. I don't
think it's ever about
money. Very few of our presidents have been there and really stolen the joint
on the way out the door.
They want power. Who has the... Now, when I was in grade school, the president
of the United States was
thought to be the most respected, revered, honored office anywhere. Is it still
that way or... Oh, I don't
think it is and I don't see how it could be. I mean, coming after Vietnam and
Watergate, which were both
presidential operations. Vietnam was not a declared war. It was not a
congressional war. We never voted on
it. It was run by the authority of several presidents. And Watergate, which
probably destroyed the authority of the
presidency for a generation, which is basically Carter's problem. I think with
those two things back to back,
the presidency is not... can't be what it was at a time when we were simpler
and perhaps more innocent
country. But on the other hand, we're a much more intelligent and better
educated country than we ever
were before. So that also makes us leery of the heroic presidency. And I think
that's a good thing.
Yeah. I want to talk about that in a second. Let me get one final question in
here on this topic that
you hear all the time. And that is, would it make any difference whether you
were president, whether I
was president, whether that guy was president? Well, I think it always does
because you remember,
these guys are not sitting around deciding sewer bills. They have the strategic
air command. They
have the hydrogen bomb. If in a fit of peak, they decide to destroy Ecuador
over the weekend, they can
do it. But they could also do some really bizarre things that could lead to the
extermination of
everybody. So obviously the stakes in the presidency are much higher than on
any other level. I think,
however, to think that any president is going to save us or change the quality
of our day-to-day life,
I think is asking too much. Yeah, I think that's where people start to get
frustrated because they
may not see a direct connection between what goes on in Washington and what
they have for dinner or what
they're doing. Well, I don't know. Come to think of it, it could affect that.
Anyway, you brought up the
topic of heroes in politics, and we'll talk about heroes in general and other
things with Pete Hamill.
We have to pause for a commercial. We'll be right back.
Join John Chancellor, David Brinkley, and the entire NBC News team
for an unconventional view of the Republican convention. Decision 80 coverage
begins July 14th on NBC.
Welcome back. We're talking to Pete Hamill about cheap motels, and I'm going to
get this out of my
system, and then we'll go on to new business here in a minute. Last night I was
watching what was
called a fight. It was a heavyweight fight, a championship fight. Did you see
that? Yes, I did.
And it was Scott Ledoux and Larry Holmes. I could have fought Scott Ledoux.
Nothing against the man.
It just seemed like a mismatch. But what was interesting there was Muhammad Ali
was there toward the end,
trying to garner himself some attention. And I was thinking to myself, is this
guy what we consider
to be a hero? You mentioned heroes in politics, and are there any existent
heroes anymore?
Well, I think he was for a long period. You know, I don't think he was last
night particularly. I
thought he looked like a fool. It was silly, yeah. I mean, standing there
trying to rally this audience
in the middle of the United States somewhere to make him more money on a fight
that was horrible. But I
think there was a period at which when Ali really did speak for a certain
number of people in this
country and overcame adversity. I think we always think of heroes as people who
do overcome adversity
in some way. And Ali, after all, was robbed of three and a half years of his
prime fighting life
during the period of Vietnam because he wouldn't go in the army, as many, many
other people wouldn't do.
And I think he came back then and proved something. I think now it's tragic
what's going on with Ali. I
hope he never fights again. I think he's going to get hurt. I don't like the
way he talks. I think that part
of it is really sad. But there certainly was a period in which he was a hero to
a lot of people.
Now, what does that mean? I was trying to think, as you were talking there, who
would be a hero to
me now. And I just don't know. When I was a kid, I guess I had heroes. But I
think that's what it is,
David. I think heroes are things you have when you're a kid. Grown people,
mature people who have
learned that life is a lot more complex than a cowboy movie don't have heroes.
You don't have... I don't need a
hero. I don't want a heroic leader. The last country that elected heroic
leaders was Nazi Germany. We
don't need heroic leadership. What we need is heroic goals in a way. We need to
say, okay, let's have a
country with justice, in which poverty is gone, in which people go to bed at
night without hunger.
That's a terrific goal. But I think to sit around and say, let's wait till
Clark Kent takes his clothes off
in the phone booth and we'll all watch the latest guy whiz around the sky. I
think that's berserk and
infantile. Do you think that this country has some sort of an obsession to
place somebody arbitrarily
in the role of hero? I do think we have. And I think it comes out of the
general culture. I mean,
a country that consumes as much television, as many movies as we do, that has a
media that's fixed on
personalities tends to create desires to have heroes. But I think it's really
something we should be very,
very leery of. I don't think it's a healthy thing for people that go around in
search of the hero,
the man on the white horse. You know what I like? When there's something
of nationwide or worldwide impact to divert our attention to make day-to-day
life interesting.
Mount St. Helens, for example. That was interesting. Unfortunately, it was also
tragic,
but it was interesting. When we set out to put a man on the moon, there was
something we could follow
the progress of day-to-day. And it seems like there's just, is there anything
going on like that now?
Well, the American League race is almost over. There's no Olympics to go to,
and we're going to sell wheat to the Russians.
I don't think that certainly the presidential election is one where at the end
we'll say,
okay, let's cast this guy in bronze and stick him in the park. I don't think
that's going to happen.
No, I don't think there's anything like that going on. And we have to deal with
our own daily lives,
which can be banal and boring and also very heroic on some levels. I think a
woman struggling in a ghetto
to get her kids educated and fed and maybe into college and into medical school,
I think that's a
heroic person. That's a lot more heroic than any of the clowns we see presented
to us as movie stars.
I think it's much more heroic for a guy who really gets up in the morning, six
o'clock in the morning and
works and goes to work. That's a heroic enterprise in a country that doesn't
even value work very much.
anymore. Now, um, is it true now that the motion picture business is waning?
Uh, is that a double on time for that? No, I don't, I don't mean that I'm waning.
That's interesting that I would say that, but, uh. It is, I think, well, but
everything is off.
The movie, the movies are not doing any business this summer except for The
Empire Strikes Back and, uh.
Now, what does that mean? Does that mean something's going on socially here or
people just not going to
movies? Well, I can't pretend to speak for everybody, but it appears that, uh,
a picture
like Empire Strikes Back, which has nothing at all to do with reality, has
nothing at all to do with
inflation, gas prices, or any of the other things that Ed Newman was talking
about earlier on the news,
that a total, complete fantasy taking place in another universe seems to have
an appeal to
people much more than, uh, than the nitty gritty of our lives, which is sad.
Yeah, yeah. Because we're living, we're living interesting lives. If we look at
our own lives
and decide what they're about, they're interesting. They're much more
interesting than any fantasy
created by, uh, by two guys sitting around a swimming pool in Beverly Hills.
Um, but we've been taught not to recognize that our own personal dramas are
interesting.
Yeah. Do you have, uh, we're out of time here, and this is, uh, silly to do,
but you have any, uh,
thoughts about the decade in front of us? Anything there that?
Well, I think the music's going to be good.
All right. And on that note of, uh, incredible Ernest, Ernest, Ernest, whatever,
uh, we have to
pause. Uh, we've been talking with Pete Hamill. Thank you, sir, for being here
this morning.
And, uh, this will continue, though, nonetheless, right after this.

Pete Hamill on The David Letterman Show, July 8, 1980

Good morning and welcome to the show. I'm adjusting my socks, ladies and
gentlemen.
Keep your seats if you will. Thank you. My name is David Letterman and we're
happy to have you
here today. Pete Hamill will be with us in this half hour. Also Edie McClurg,
Laudan Wainwright
III. And earlier in the first half hour, I made a reference to I Love Lucy rerun.
And I said
something about something, something, something. And I mentioned Motel 6 and
people just sat
there. Let me ask you this. Now, if I'd said cheap motel, would that have made
any difference?
Apparently no appreciable difference. I appreciate those of you who have just
joining us putting up
with this bit of nonsense, but it's very important to whether or not I continue
in this capacity or
go to heavy equipment school. Our next guest has been a journalist for 20 years.
He's also a
screenwriter, a novelist, and contributing editor to New York Magazine. We're
going to find out what
his favorite episode of I Love Lucy is. Let's welcome Pete Hamill, please.
Mr. Hamill. Pleasure to meet you, sir. Thank you for being here.
Did you hear me make that reference to Lucy and Fred and the...
And the sheep motel?
No, no, no, no. Not the sheep motel. Oh, heavens. Now I've really done it.
No, no, no. Sheep motel. Nonetheless, that's my problem. Nice of you to be with
us this morning.
How are things for you? Are you excited as a journalist about anything like the
conventions
coming to town, the presidential election, politics, anything there?
Well, I think the election is going to be kind of fun. I think of it as the
Larry, Curly,
and Moe election. Who would be who there? Or just pick anyone, I guess.
The odd finger. You know, whoever wins on the bat. I think that part of it is
going to be kind
of fun because they're basically the three guys. The whole country, I think,
feels, "My God,
how can 220 million people labor so mightily to produce three mice?"
You'd think that a country that has done the things this country has done would
produce better
leaders in a way. We haven't, and we're stuck with these three guys.
You might as well sit back and enjoy it. Yeah, I suppose so. But why is that?
Are there other men
who are better qualified who are not interested? Or other women who are better
qualified who are
not interested? Are they doing other things? Are they...?
I think it's basically the process of politics itself ensures a kind of mediocrity
among the guys.
It's just a dismal profession, if you go at it the way most people go, which is
to start from the lowest
level, eating boiled chicken at a million dinners, and hoping that you don't
diet to main on your way
to the district leadership or something. We do... It's interesting, for example,
that Reagan,
a sort of second-rate actor, would become a first-rate politician.
Yeah. It's almost impossible to think of George C. Scott running for president,
who's a great actor.
Right. Or even some of the movie star types like Redford and Newman, because
there's something
frightening about excellence. I think if you get a really mediocre actor, you
figure, "Well, he won't
do anything. Jack Carson will talk to him in the White House and straighten him
out if he does anything
really awful." What would the motivation be for these guys? It can't be money.
I mean,
what makes a guy want to run? Why would... I think that it always is power.
People want power
either to do things or to have a sense of superiority over other people. I don't
think it's ever about
money. Very few of our presidents have been there and really stolen the joint
on the way out the door.
They want power. Who has the... Now, when I was in grade school, the president
of the United States was
thought to be the most respected, revered, honored office anywhere. Is it still
that way or... Oh, I don't
think it is and I don't see how it could be. I mean, coming after Vietnam and
Watergate, which were both
presidential operations. Vietnam was not a declared war. It was not a
congressional war. We never voted on
it. It was run by the authority of several presidents. And Watergate, which
probably destroyed the authority of the
presidency for a generation, which is basically Carter's problem. I think with
those two things back to back,
the presidency is not... can't be what it was at a time when we were simpler
and perhaps more innocent
country. But on the other hand, we're a much more intelligent and better
educated country than we ever
were before. So that also makes us leery of the heroic presidency. And I think
that's a good thing.
Yeah. I want to talk about that in a second. Let me get one final question in
here on this topic that
you hear all the time. And that is, would it make any difference whether you
were president, whether I
was president, whether that guy was president? Well, I think it always does
because you remember,
these guys are not sitting around deciding sewer bills. They have the strategic
air command. They
have the hydrogen bomb. If in a fit of peak, they decide to destroy Ecuador
over the weekend, they can
do it. But they could also do some really bizarre things that could lead to the
extermination of
everybody. So obviously the stakes in the presidency are much higher than on
any other level. I think,
however, to think that any president is going to save us or change the quality
of our day-to-day life,
I think is asking too much. Yeah, I think that's where people start to get
frustrated because they
may not see a direct connection between what goes on in Washington and what
they have for dinner or what
they're doing. Well, I don't know. Come to think of it, it could affect that.
Anyway, you brought up the
topic of heroes in politics, and we'll talk about heroes in general and other
things with Pete Hamill.
We have to pause for a commercial. We'll be right back.
Join John Chancellor, David Brinkley, and the entire NBC News team
for an unconventional view of the Republican convention. Decision 80 coverage
begins July 14th on NBC.
Welcome back. We're talking to Pete Hamill about cheap motels, and I'm going to
get this out of my
system, and then we'll go on to new business here in a minute. Last night I was
watching what was
called a fight. It was a heavyweight fight, a championship fight. Did you see
that? Yes, I did.
And it was Scott Ledoux and Larry Holmes. I could have fought Scott Ledoux.
Nothing against the man.
It just seemed like a mismatch. But what was interesting there was Muhammad Ali
was there toward the end,
trying to garner himself some attention. And I was thinking to myself, is this
guy what we consider
to be a hero? You mentioned heroes in politics, and are there any existent
heroes anymore?
Well, I think he was for a long period. You know, I don't think he was last
night particularly. I
thought he looked like a fool. It was silly, yeah. I mean, standing there
trying to rally this audience
in the middle of the United States somewhere to make him more money on a fight
that was horrible. But I
think there was a period at which when Ali really did speak for a certain
number of people in this
country and overcame adversity. I think we always think of heroes as people who
do overcome adversity
in some way. And Ali, after all, was robbed of three and a half years of his
prime fighting life
during the period of Vietnam because he wouldn't go in the army, as many, many
other people wouldn't do.
And I think he came back then and proved something. I think now it's tragic
what's going on with Ali. I
hope he never fights again. I think he's going to get hurt. I don't like the
way he talks. I think that part
of it is really sad. But there certainly was a period in which he was a hero to
a lot of people.
Now, what does that mean? I was trying to think, as you were talking there, who
would be a hero to
me now. And I just don't know. When I was a kid, I guess I had heroes. But I
think that's what it is,
David. I think heroes are things you have when you're a kid. Grown people,
mature people who have
learned that life is a lot more complex than a cowboy movie don't have heroes.
You don't have... I don't need a
hero. I don't want a heroic leader. The last country that elected heroic
leaders was Nazi Germany. We
don't need heroic leadership. What we need is heroic goals in a way. We need to
say, okay, let's have a
country with justice, in which poverty is gone, in which people go to bed at
night without hunger.
That's a terrific goal. But I think to sit around and say, let's wait till
Clark Kent takes his clothes off
in the phone booth and we'll all watch the latest guy whiz around the sky. I
think that's berserk and
infantile. Do you think that this country has some sort of an obsession to
place somebody arbitrarily
in the role of hero? I do think we have. And I think it comes out of the
general culture. I mean,
a country that consumes as much television, as many movies as we do, that has a
media that's fixed on
personalities tends to create desires to have heroes. But I think it's really
something we should be very,
very leery of. I don't think it's a healthy thing for people that go around in
search of the hero,
the man on the white horse. You know what I like? When there's something
of nationwide or worldwide impact to divert our attention to make day-to-day
life interesting.
Mount St. Helens, for example. That was interesting. Unfortunately, it was also
tragic,
but it was interesting. When we set out to put a man on the moon, there was
something we could follow
the progress of day-to-day. And it seems like there's just, is there anything
going on like that now?
Well, the American League race is almost over. There's no Olympics to go to,
and we're going to sell wheat to the Russians.
I don't think that certainly the presidential election is one where at the end
we'll say,
okay, let's cast this guy in bronze and stick him in the park. I don't think
that's going to happen.
No, I don't think there's anything like that going on. And we have to deal with
our own daily lives,
which can be banal and boring and also very heroic on some levels. I think a
woman struggling in a ghetto
to get her kids educated and fed and maybe into college and into medical school,
I think that's a
heroic person. That's a lot more heroic than any of the clowns we see presented
to us as movie stars.
I think it's much more heroic for a guy who really gets up in the morning, six
o'clock in the morning and
works and goes to work. That's a heroic enterprise in a country that doesn't
even value work very much.
anymore. Now, um, is it true now that the motion picture business is waning?
Uh, is that a double on time for that? No, I don't, I don't mean that I'm waning.
That's interesting that I would say that, but, uh. It is, I think, well, but
everything is off.
The movie, the movies are not doing any business this summer except for The
Empire Strikes Back and, uh.
Now, what does that mean? Does that mean something's going on socially here or
people just not going to
movies? Well, I can't pretend to speak for everybody, but it appears that, uh,
a picture
like Empire Strikes Back, which has nothing at all to do with reality, has
nothing at all to do with
inflation, gas prices, or any of the other things that Ed Newman was talking
about earlier on the news,
that a total, complete fantasy taking place in another universe seems to have
an appeal to
people much more than, uh, than the nitty gritty of our lives, which is sad.
Yeah, yeah. Because we're living, we're living interesting lives. If we look at
our own lives
and decide what they're about, they're interesting. They're much more
interesting than any fantasy
created by, uh, by two guys sitting around a swimming pool in Beverly Hills.
Um, but we've been taught not to recognize that our own personal dramas are
interesting.
Yeah. Do you have, uh, we're out of time here, and this is, uh, silly to do,
but you have any, uh,
thoughts about the decade in front of us? Anything there that?
Well, I think the