It strikes us that Joy Behar and David Letterman are the only interviewers on television who are smart, good-natured, and funny enough to completely scorch their subjects on TV but still manage to keep them onstage. Both, perhaps because they are comedians, are tuned into how much they can get away with and still keep guests laughing. John McCain famously fell victim to both of them last year during the presidential election, and though there have been many since, their most recent victim is Rod Blagojevich. Sure, he’s an easy target, but both of them did a better job of revealing his deep insanity than any of the professional journalists who have interrogated him over the past few weeks. From Joy bouncing up and down and trying to get him to say, in Richard Nixon’s voice, “I am not a crook,” to Letterman asking Blago, “Why are you here?” — the two of them have gone a long way in reminding us that, just because someone in politics takes a point of view, it doesn’t mean we have to take it seriously. Click through to watch Letterman’s masterwork from last night.
The highlight of this portion is when Letterman asks Blago to “set up the clip,” as though he’s an actor plugging a movie, and then plays one of his wiretaps.
