David Letterman - 2015 Peabody Award Acceptance Speech

Peabody Winner 2015 David Letterman entered our late-night lives like a ghost of television’s past and its future, reviving the anar-chic, anything-goes antics of pioneers like Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs but also pushing the parameters with a postmodern sense of irony. On Late Night with David Letterman, post-Tonight on NBC, he was a one-man fringe festival, a daffy dadaist who found hilarious new uses for Velcro, watermelons and monkeys. He dismissed the obsequious veneer of showbiz chitchat and made celebrities work for their promotional plugs, expecting them to play at his comedic level or be left twisting in the wind. His irreverence, his tongue-in-cheek Top Ten lists, his outlandish sight gags and his prickly personality resonated with the young and the sleepless and the TV-jaded. Late Night won a Peabody in 1991, cited by the Board of Jurors for its “freshness and imagination.” When NBC didn’t give him the retiring Johnny Carson’s chair, Letterman in 1992 took his circus to CBS, where the earli