David Letterman said in an interview with GQ magazine that “retirement is nonsense.” The 77-year-old television icon spent 33 years hosting late-night television shows, starting with the 1982 debut of “Late Night” on NBC and continuing with CBS’ “The Late Show” from 1993 to 2015. He now hosts his own Netflix talk series, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” which most recently dropped new episodes over the summer. Letterman has no plans to give up his television gig.
“Retirement is a myth. Retirement is nonsense,” he told the publication when asked about the status of his career. “You won’t retire. The human mechanism will not allow you to retire. What do [people] do? Sit there and wait for ‘Judge Judy’ to come on?”
“As long as you are healthy, you still want to produce,” Letterman continued. “And you will find ways to. Once I stopped doing the show, it took me a couple of years to figure out that, oh, this is a completely different rhythm. And without the rhythm that you’re accustomed to, largely unsatisfying. So you got to find something that’s important to you.”
Letterman holds the record for longest-serving late-night talk show host in American television history, with 6,080 episodes under his belt. He told GQ he is much happier now that he’s out of the late-night spotlight.
“I felt like whenever I would go out, there would be an expectation to which I could not live up. ‘Oh, here he comes. He’s going to do a show. He is going to be funny. We’re going to be entertained,'” Letterman said about his late-night years. “And I kind of felt like that expectation takes quite a lot of energy, so I didn’t want to bleed it off before or after the actual show, which was always in desperate need of entertainment.”
Letterman said his antisocial reputation was mainly because he was always saving his energy for his late-night shows, which would then leave him with no energy left to give others in public settings.
“You would either then spend time preparing, time ruminating about what may have gone wrong or trying to enjoy what may have gone right. And anything else didn’t matter. And that’s the mistake of having a career where it’s the same thing each and every night,” he said. “Now, I still advise people not to retire, but it was so single focused. If we can make these three, 400 people laugh every night, that’s our responsibility. So the idea that it actually transported beyond that would always come as kind of a glaring surprise.”
Watch Letterman’s full video interview with GQ magazine below.
English (US) ·