It’s fascinating to watch David Letterman appear on John Mulaney‘s 2025 late-night talk show. Almost exactly a decade after Letterman said goodbye to his reign as all-time iconic talk show host, seeing the carelessly bearded Dave bantering with the natty Mulaney on this week’s Everybody’s Live is to watch past and present confront each other with different shades of ironic laughter.
Letterman, in his long and storied career, was a consummate put-on artist in the guise of a traditional talk show ringleader. He peppered interviews with visiting movie stars with a glinting detachment from the usual chat show scripted banter and canned anecdotes. Dave was always Dave, his midwestern skepticism uncowed by tradition and glamor, yet reveling in the comic possibilities afforded by his unlikely position.
John Mulaney, weaned as he was on Letterman’s style as generations of comics have been, presides over his own version of the late-night show. His is a mutant offshoot of the form that relishes in the largesse of streaming ubiquity while still affording the longtime stand-up and TV writing maestro freedom to indulge his own take-me-or-leave-me vision. Everybody’s Live is a late-night show untroubled by the need to chase ratings or the latest stars—it’s Mulaney, with Netflix cash and a career’s worth of comedy cred, viewing the genre as a toy chest of bits, skits, and people he just wants to hang out with. His show is at once deeply personal and airily offhand.
It’s a meeting of two masters of showbiz irony, and I’m going to go ahead and claim that the payoff to Mulaney’s episodes-long “line up 24 dudes at one inch intervals” stunt is a direct reference to The Comedy Team That Weighs the Same. For those not up on your Late Night With David Letterman history (or stories from the late Tom Davis’ Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss), the running gag saw the lanky Davis and his longtime SNL partner and stockier half Al Franken promising to have their eventual TV weigh-in clock them at the exact same weight. (They triumphantly clocked in at a more or less exact 167 pounds.)
“You’re not gonna see that anywhere are you?,” Letterman asked Franken in a podcast appearance long after the fact, and while I have no idea if John Mulaney took that as a challenge, the payoff to his “Know Your H” campaign to line up 24 guys in a perfect diagonal certainly feels like it. As Mulaney notes to an understanding Letterman tonight, “The amount of unfunny planning that goes into a bit that’s supposed to be loose…”
That might be an index card pinned up in the Everybody’s Live writer’s room, maybe alongside a Letterman head shot. The eventual reveal of the 24 incrementally tall men that take the stage at the end of tonight’s show is decidedly anticlimactic, the episode-long buildup (including one tearful 6-footer being disqualified for lying about his stature only to be replaced by a heroically late-arriving Jimmy Kimmel) feeling like part of the joke. As much as we want to see that perfect inclined plane of man, it’s funnier (and dumber, and smarter) to undersell it, while the underwhelming burst of confetti greeting the feat mirrors the Thanos-style dissolution of the wine-swilling heckler who kicked off the stunt several episodes ago. (And that’s Gap Band singer Charlie Wilson upping the joke by crooning the national anthem.)
Episode 6 of Everybody’s Live treats Letterman’s appearance with format-breaking comic reverence. An unprecedented cold open with a mic-toting Mulaney feinting toward a similarly unprecedented topical bit about the current constitutional crisis gives way to the frenzied backstage prep for that measure-in. Hyping up the bit beyond all measure, Mulaney cites the security he’s employed (to be fair, he’s right that a potential sniper need only kill one participant to scuttle the whole thing), before segueing into his opening monologue.
A running theme this season has been that even Mulaney doesn’t know what he’s actually doing here, his pronouncement here that his sort-of late-night show “looks and sounds like it’s real, but it’s just kind of off” is a more succinct definition than any I’ve come up with. Letterman’s presence makes the call-in segments even more of an afterthought than usual (although one guy’s claim that he traveled to Turkey for a painful, leg-breaking procedure to increase his already ample height six inches had the panel wide-eyed). Mulaney introduces Hannibal Buress and Nikki Glaser as two of his best stand-up pals, while Leanne Morgan’s ultra-southern schtick gets tiresome, but none can compete with the hirsute legend nestled beside them on Mulaney’s couch.
Apart from the height bit, there wasn’t much time left for sketches. Mulaney’s visit to a storefront tax preparer yielded not much, while the week’s celebrity audience member was genuinely terrifying, as Mulaney happily threw to the thing that emerged from behind the Winkie’s dumpster in Mulholland Drive. Yes, that was actress Bonnie Aarons, and yes, just seeing her in full, unblinking, filth-caked person triggered my David Lynch-engendered heebie-jeebies all over again.
The other filmed piece was another bit of elaborate anti-comedy, as Richard Kind’s would-be killer Charlie XCX improv is revealed to be the hard work of two of Everybody’s Live‘s writers, whose behind the scenes documentary about what they and Kind were certain would be a viral TV moment traffics in just the right tone of aw-shucks faux humility and self-congratulation. With Letterman in the house, it’s impossible to ignore how much of modern comedy, late-night or otherwise, echoes stuff he was doing decades previous.
For Dave himself, this sort of coded tribute is barely acknowledged, even as the entire episode plays out in one extended thank you. Indeed, as shown in his own Netflix talk show, Letterman allows his wonted ironic facade to slip, when Mulaney expresses sincere gratitude for the time Mulaney’s dad hung out with Dave in Mulaney’s episode of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. Dave gifted the senior Mulaney with the Emmy he won for that show, which is simultaneously about as sweet and appropriately goofy as it gets.
Sweet, too, is Mulaney’s obvious love for musical guest Randy Newman. The 81-year-old singer-songwriter legend looks every minute his age as he sings a lilting version of his oft-covered “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today.” The song’s optimistic lyric, “Bright before me the signs implore me/To help the needy and show them the way/ Human kindness it’s overflowing/And I think it’s going to rain today” is a much more generous rebuttal to current events than we deserve. (Newman does close with his acid America-bashing anthem “Political Science” to prove he’s still got his edge.) The sight of the 78-year-old Letterman beaming from the wings at his frequent musical guest speaks volumes.
This episode of Everybody’s Live breaks the format with purpose and unspoken clarity. A different show—and host—would gush over how much David Letterman’s comedy informed his own. John Mulaney, true to form and with unerring restraint, fashions a Letterman homage without further comment.
