David Letterman 2015 Peabody Award Acceptance Speech

Peabody Winner 2015 David Letterman entered our latenight lives like a ghost of televisions past and its future, reviving the anarchic, anythinggoes 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, postTonight on NBC, he was a oneman 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 tongueincheek Top Ten lists, his outlandish sight gags and his prickly personality resonated with the young and the sleepless and the TVjaded. Late Night won a Peabody in 1991, cited by the Board of Jurors for its freshness and imagination. When NBC didnt give him the retiring Johnny Carsons chair, Letterman in 1992 took his circus to CBS, where the earli