Crispin Glover on Late Night with David Letterman in 1987
Many people have compared Joaquin Phoenix's bizarre appearance on Letterman last night to Cripin Glover's "performance art" appearance on Letterman's NBC show in 1987. Curious about this, I dug up a clip of that show, and discovered that the way Letterman handled it then was pretty much the way I would have handled last night. Maybe he's mellowed a bit over the years...
7 comments:
Dave has definitely mellowed a lot. Check out his '86 interview of John Waters -- Letterman is acting like a complete ass (without any apparent provocation). Guess he's not a fan of them ho-mo-sexuals.
I'm watching Rachel Maddow and touching myself right now
i still dont buy letterman not being in on this
the guy had kaufman on all the time...he knew when an actor was doing a bit
After watching Rachel Maddow and touching myself for about 13 hours I've decided to speak to some business leaders...uh...you may have seen that. It was uh, ha ha pretty good double talk. Uh, now what I'd like urbody to think about is that if you uh watch that show, Lost. Its uh well you know time travel makes you a little goofy so I guess old Crispins a little crispy from the time travel.
Uh, now, I'm gonna go make some more references to FDR and Abe Lincoln somewhere in uh, I don't know maybe Maryland...and then I'm going to touch myself while watching Rachel Maddow and have Michelle do the same, cuz she's uh, a pretty big Maddow fan too...and we're gonna then have sasha and moliquaw or uh whatever her name is take off their close and fight one another till they bleed. Then I'm going to uh get some of that blood and uh...use it for uh lube while make love to the girls' mother in front of them. S & M as Michelle and I call them will then chant yes he can yes he can! over and over while I titty fuck my wife and then when I blow a load on all three of them... TA DAH JUST JOKING WE CALL IT THE ARISTOCRATS!!!!
FDR and Abe Lincoln used to do this same thing.
I dunno. Seems like if these types of stunts (if that's what they truly are) always go over like a lead balloon. There is a very narrow sliver of the population that for whatever reason believes that if a celebrity feigns mental illness and participates in outrageous or shocking behavior, that somehow he's a "genius". Seriously? A genius for feigning mental illness? Any idiot leap over the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior. It has been done, and by more brilliant people than Glover or Phoenix. I certainly didn't see Glover's career take off after his stunt. And 20+ years later he's not considered a legend except by that small group of people that throw around comments like "ahead of his time" and "under-appreciated".
If your antics are designed to bring attention to yourself, you ought to have some substance behind it to hold that attention, otherwise you're just another attention whore flailing around in traffic.
The talk show circut is really lame. Why anyone watches is beyond me. It's just a commercial. It must be the most boring job in the world to read bad jokes off cue cards and ask about the new movie night after night. Fuck Conan, Letterman, Leno. Fuck us for sopping up this corporate consumer celebrity bullshit.
Crispin Glover was performing as a character he had invented (Rubin). The character was later the focus of a movie called Rubin and Ed. Not particularly funny, but Rubin wasn't supposed to be overtly funny. He was supposed to appear not to be in on the joke. I'm sure that part of the delivery of the character required Dave to appear not to know. Phoenix was annoying because Crispin did it before, in nearly the same way, just with a different created character. It's boring if it's already been done. Now Farrah Fawcett, that was classic.
Post a Comment