Letterman Is a Top-10 List All by Himself

David Letterman is listening to frequent guest Sandra Bernhard.

As Bernhard is telling Letterman one of her bizarre stories, a chimpanzee wearing a tiny minicam on its head repeatedly whizzes by on roller skates.

Then the same chimpanzee, whose name is Zippy, whizzes by on a skateboard.

Again and again-- whhhhoooosh! --Zippy passes in front of the camera.

Soon Bernhard, whose stock in trade as a comic is humor that’s outrageous, appears rattled. Her lanky body slung across her chair like a rag doll, she’s cracking up, unable to continue.

Later, when Zippy bites her, Bernhard stops laughing.

A comic upstaged and assaulted by a careening chimpanzee? That is outrageous.

NBC’s “Late Night With David Letterman” is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a 90-minute retrospective at 9:30 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39. The show was not available for previewing, but unless NBC mistakenly fills it with Rick Dees clips from ABC, the anniversary program promises to be hilarious.

That’s because, as the above example from 1986 affirms, there has never been an hour of TV more inventive or consistently funny than this late-night oasis of wonderful nonsense and inspired absurdity headed by a man who somehow became a stunningly good talk show host while being a stunningly bad interviewer.

Fortunately, Letterman is now as accessible to morning viewers and late-afternooners as he is to late-nighters, with cable’s Arts & Entertainment network rerunning his old 12:30 a.m. shows weekdays at 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Many of these oldies--even those from the early 1980s--are still a monumental hoot and as contemporary as ever. Watch:

Letterman speaks through a bullhorn from an office window high up in New York’s Rockefeller Plaza in 1985, interrupting an outdoor taping of “Today” by announcing himself as then-NBC News President Larry Grossman, then adding: “And I’m not wearing any pants!”

Well, you get the idea.

Rebounding from the commercial failure of his brash and creative NBC morning series, Letterman in late night was rip-roaringly unique from the start. The goal was to be “what is not ‘The Tonight Show,’ and that was everything else we could think of that we had the time and money to do,” recalls Merrill Markoe, whose 1982-86 stint on Letterman’s late-night show included segment producing and a year as head writer. (They also had a 10-year romantic relationship, which ended in 1988.)

Some bits that would turn out to be the show’s signature components were initially opposed by NBC, Markoe says. “NBC research guys came to us with charts about what we should not use--including ‘Stupid Pet Tricks’--because they said people just did not get it (on the morning show). They wanted trained animals. They also said there was no use for music after a certain hour. That for me defined what network research is.”

Markoe said another Stupid Network Trick was NBC’s resistance to hiring bandleader Paul Shaffer, who would come into his own as Letterman’s ironic co-banterer and be responsible for some of the show’s wittiest moments.

The man who gave the premiere hour an especially memorable send-off was none other than Calvert DeForest, known professionally as Larry (Bud) Melman, the bizarre, jowly little dumpling of a third banana who was hired based on his appearance in a student film.

Having the somber Larry “Bud” open the show was director Hal Gurnee’s inspiration, Markoe says. Gurnee had seen the original Frankenstein movie, which began with an announcer stepping from behind a curtain and welcoming the audience. DeForest came out and repeated the same speech to launch “Late Night With David Letterman.”

“What you see may sicken you. . . .”

Perhaps he meant the straight interviews. They’re the area of the show where Letterman often is either brutally insulting, condescending or self-absorbed and oblivious to his sacrificial guests, brushing them off the way one flicks lint from a lapel. Had Letterman and not Jay Leno been picked to succeed Johnny Carson--a job Letterman desperately wanted--what an adventure he would be, night after night attempting the affable small talk that’s required on “The Tonight Show.”

When not struggling through interviews on straight topics, however, Letterman has been spectacular. It’s not only the show’s energy and somewhat bent humor but also its aura of danger--a sense of the unexpected--that has helped separate it from the crowd.

“Arsenio” has a glint of that. Dennis Miller’s new syndicated talk show (11:30 p.m. on KTLA Channel 5) does not, having been unable so far to adapt Miller’s singular qualities as a literate, topical comic--who can be extremely funny--to a format that is blandly conventional and derivative of “The Tonight Show.”

From the interview area in front of a scene of nighttime Los Angeles to Miller’s style of questioning (“Somebody told me you . . . “) to the monologue in front of the curtain, this is Junior Johnny. The difference is that Carson is the format’s master, Miller its slave.

Obviously, he’s a work still in progress. But late-night Miller is so far what late-night Letterman has never been: inert and boring.

“I knew Dave could do things (bits) on the phone,” Markoe recalls. “But one of his requirements right off the bat was that he wanted to take the camera other places because he admired Steve Allen’s old show.”

So Markoe spent much of her time thumbing through the Yellow Pages in search of locations for potent bits, whether playing off the routine or the offbeat. There was, for example, that classic, “Alan Alda: A Man and His Chinese Food,” in which “serious” investigative reporter Letterman grilled the owner of a restaurant reportedly favored by Alda about the star’s eating tastes and use of chopsticks. The bit was an enormous success--that is to say, exquisitely uninformative.

“One of the really strange ones I remember was a cross between a remote and the old ‘College Bowl,’ ” she says. “I found a couple of Chinese restaurants on the East Side. One was called Hunan College and the other was called Hunan University. We went down there and filmed one of those ‘Let’s Look at Their Campuses’ kinds of things. Then we brought them (the restaurateurs) into the studio and had them do a ‘College Bowl’ based on their menus.”

What Markoe recalls most about the early years was “the endless amount of churning. I’m amazed at the amount of stuff we did, two or three comedy pieces a day. We were always ordering sets. We were always ordering props. I was always in editing. You’d get a lot of things done and be covered for Monday and Tuesday, then realize you had nothing for Wednesday.”

Letterman lately has been speaking of possible new horizons and relinquishing NBC’s wee-hours comedy post to someone younger. Or perhaps he’ll continue where he is, remaining available in case Leno flops as Carson’s successor.

“Dave’s genuinely smart, which makes him dangerous,” Markoe says.

And he’s wearing no pants!