Strike Force Five Rides Again!: Now with Dave

Once again, we have one of the better episodes for the Strike Force Five podcast – which is no small thing since all 12 episodes were wonderful, at times hilarious.

For those new to Strike Force Five, the five hosts of talk shows – Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver – teamed up during the recent Writers Guild strike to do a weekly podcast.  The point was to raise money for each of their staffs. 

As I’ve noted, what stands out from the podcasts is how much the hosts seem to truly like and respect the others – though being comedians have no trouble ridiculing the others, at times mercilessly, including relentlessly bringing up past derision from previous weeks, not letting foolish misdeeds be forgotten.

This is Episode 9, and they make a slight change for it, inviting a guest to participate.  And that guest is David Letterman.  He’s very funny here…as are they all.  But something else is different from the episode.  When Jon Stewart guested, which I posted here, it was a sort of boisterous roundtable, with everyone joining in with funny stories and chiding one another, all the while holding Stewart in great respect.  With David Letterman, it’s more a case of them all holding him in awe.  And so, as a result of that, while the show remains very funny, it’s not as funny as the others – but that’s also its strength.

That’s because David Letterman famously doesn’t like praise and talking about himself, so he rarely does interviews.  But here, though he’s not being “interviewed,” all the other hosts want to know tons of things about him and repeatedly launch questions his way.  Periodically, Letterman starts to feel awkward and changes the subject to asking questions to the others.  And that brings out good, additional stories from them – but it rarely lasts long because it gets them thinking about how their own stories relate to Letterman and turn things back to him.  The result is that this, in many ways, turns into the “interview” of David Letterman that no one gets.  And it's a fun, interesting, very funny one.

I can’t embed the podcast, which was done for Spotify, but here’s a link to the episode on the Strike Force Five website.