Lucas Klauss

There’s an excellent article in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone about the first year of Late Night with David Letterman. The article isn’t available online to non-subscribers*, but here’s an excerpt I found fascinating:

By the end of its first year, Late Night was still a cult hit, drawing only a million viewers a night. A-list guests remained elusive. But a few big names had taken notice. At a grocery store on New York’s Upper West Side, [Chris] Elliott ran into Mark Hamill, then at the height of his Star Wars fame. Hamill not only recognized Elliott but admitted that he’d been videotaping Late Night off his TV from the very start. Hamill was so worried the show would get canceled - “It was so far ahead of the curve,” he says now - that he wanted to make sure he had his own copies. Later, when Late Night researchers needed a list of every “Viewer Mail” segment, they turned to Hamill, who had maintained meticulously annotated notebooks of the sketches on every show.

What? Is Mark Hamill a HUGE comedy nerd? Or was he just really, really into Late Night?

There’s lots of other interesting stuff in the article. Almost all of it is not about Mark Hamill.

*Weirdly, I have a lifetime subscription to Rolling Stone because they had this brief offer when I was in college where it was only $50. It’s an odd hodgepodge of a magazine with an unclear audience, but they often have great political and cultural articles.