The decade's best Oscars host Steve Martin (we still cherish his Best Actor intro line, "gay poet, crazed artist, a shipwrecked victim, a roman gladiator....but enough about me...") stopped by the Late Show with David Letterman last night to catch up with his old friend. Touching upon the topic of the writers strike, Martin, like so many of his fellow scribes, suddenly found himself with an abundance of free time, which he chose to fill by "writing movie scripts and TV pilots...and then I would sell them to the studios."

David Letterman developed an awesome cottage industry repeatedly tweaking his "Mitt Romney looks like..." joke before the animatronic, amazingly lifelike demagogue dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination earlier this month. But Jon Stewart just won't let the gag die. Speaking to Larry King tonight, Stewart worked in two digs about Romney, one of which actually began with the words "he looks like..." Letterman's ownership of the meme is so complete Stewart will probably have to cut a royalty check tomorrow morning, but it will be so worth it:

Demonstrating fairly impressive comedy turnaround time, David Letterman's top ten list last night was about how Jane Fonda said "cunt" on the Today show yesterday morning. The highlight is less the list (though the Katie Couric joke is funny) than Letterman's alternately gleeful and skittish explanation of the incident (also the fact that he can't quite bring himself to say "vagina."). Clip attached, enjoy.

Dave Letterman has a long history of getting flirty with his guests. From Madonna to Drew Barrymore, from Julia Roberts to any one of the countless number of leggy supermodels he's talked to over the years, Diamond Dave has never been one to shy away from batting his proverbial lashes at his guests. Depending on his mood, this flirtatiousness generally takes shape in either a slew of complimentary bon mots or, when he's feeling aggressive, a subtle graze of the knee. But when Gossip Girl Blake Lively showed up on the set on Friday night proclaiming that Dave was one of her "childhood crushes", the sexual tension between the two was not only palpable, it approached the level of David Addison and Maddie Hayes.

· On last night's Late Show, Dave and Vince Vaughn hopped into the Career Wayback machine and revisited the time Vince nearly got his ass kicked by a steroid-enhanced Peter Billingsley. An after-school special classic!
· Amy Winehouse will miss the Grammys because she been denied a U.S. visa; the Embassy fears she might attempt to use her bloodstream to smuggle enough drugs into L.A. to kill everyone in the Staples Center. [rimshot]
· Wisely, John Mayer knows that all bloggers must be allowed no closer than 30 feet to him, even on supposedly safe cruise ships.
· Hey, unicorn! [via our favorite unicorn pusher]

What will we miss most about Mitt Romney's now dead campaign? He was perfect fodder for Letterman's not-striking writers. Since Iowa, Letterman's been offering a good half-dozen Romney one-liners in every monologue. Attached, a video compilation of a few magical nights of Mitt Romney jokes. Never forget. (Our favorite, sadly, is not included: "Mitt Romney looks like the American president in a Canadian movie.")

Matthew McConaughey popped by the Late Show with David Letterman last night, having at some point in the hours since his Today Show appearance discovered the magical, groove-restoring properties of greasy hair product. It wasn't long before the actor had a bug-eyed Letterman caught helpless inside his mighty yarn-spinning coils, as he recounted the time during the Fool's Gold shoot when he dispatched a group of adventuresome children to hunt down a mostly inert snake lurking uncomfortably close to his sleeping quarters.

Paris Hilton's last appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman was, in no uncertain terms, one of the greatest moments in U.S. television history, to go up there with the moon landing, the final episode of M*A*S*H, and the entire run of Joe Millionaire in the annals of essential road-markers tracking the rise, fall, and eventual obliteration of a once-promising colonial social experiment.

America's second favorite late-night talk show host, the gap-toothed Letterman has been getting medium-sized yuks for decades.

Letterman, on comedians' union meeting in the late 1970s: "Jay, bless his heart, couldn't sit still. He was behaving like a hyperactive child. Jumping up and down, being funny and distracting, to the point where everybody sort of thought, well, maybe we shouldn't tell Jay about the next meeting." [Time]

Sean Young's bravura, Julian Schnabel-taunting performance at Saturday night's tragically untelevised DGA Awards is now officially the stuff of Hollywood legend; not only was the incident immortalized on Variety's party-monitoring V-page today (a "spirited moment" of "tipsy heckling," giggles the trade paper!), but it was openly shared with millions of David Letterman's viewers Monday night by Big Brother host and Les Moonves trophy wife Julie Chen, who didn't require any arm-twisting to cough up the name of "the well-known actress" who caused the now-much-discussed disturbance, or to take a game stab at recreating the slurred outbursts that led to Young's ejection from the event.

Yes, we realize that critiquing picket-line chants is so early November '07, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus's recollection on last night's Late Show of her time marching with her WGA brethren transported us all the way back to those early moments of the strike, when each day brought tales of the new and exciting ways writers were communicating their Guild's message.

We hadn't yet had an opportunity to snuggle up to Oscar™ Nominated® Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody until David Letterman had her on his show last night, and dare we say the young scribe handled herself with admirable aplomb as she took late night's hottest seat. In a rack-flattering leopard-skin dress, Cody—offering echoes of Lisa Simpson, Bettie Page, and the chick who snatched that last red pepper hummus from us at the Hyperion Trader Joe's—self-deprecatingly relayed all the Oscar-morning excitement, and in the process helped to usher "the buttcrack of dawn" into the popular lexicon. (While "taint of night," sadly, remains fated to the vernacular fringes.)

Why does Diane Keaton have to kill our trend story? Adderall was looking good as the pill of choice of a new creative generation. And then the 62-year-old actress, who made her name opposite Woody Allen in moves such as Manhattan, spoils it all. On the Letterman show, on CBS, on Friday, she was reminiscing about the debut of her acting career, as part of the original cast of the musical, Hair, in 1968. Keaton, who was supposed to be promoting her new movie, Mad Money, blurted out that forty years ago she and her fellow actors received injections of a methamphetamine drug, much like Adderall. And we so hoped there was something new in the creative pharmacopeia. (In another of Allen's movies in which Keaton starred, Sleeper, at least the future had some medical advances, such as the orgasmatron.) After the jump, the clip from the Letterman show.

Bill O'Reilly's crusade against NBC (the result of his feud with MSNBC runner Keith Olbermann) reached a dramatic and hilarious peak recently when he sent his correspondents to ambush GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt. Because they used to sell airplane parts to Iran, you see! This is a target far greater in power and influence than O'Reilly's usual liberal bugbears, but it's certainly not unprecedented for certain TV rebels to attack the giant conglomerate. It's just that it usually happens on programs broadcast on GE's own network. Join us for a few entertaining examples, won't you?

Gawker regular Brian Van shot this picture outside David Letterman's Ed Sullivan Theater. We saw that sketch last night (23 striking writers, a guy in a Spider-man suit, Moses, and a guy in a bear suit all fit in a Jamba Juice—classic stuff) and we still have no idea what this gentleman's sign is about.

Ever since the late night talk shows returned to the air, Leno has been beating Letterman in the ratings, as he has for a good dozen years. This despite Leno still working without his writers (a terrible, uncomfortable sight), all of whom are still on strike. Letterman's production company's deal with the WGA gave him back his staff, but hasn't awarded him a ratings edge—until Monday! "In the overnight ratings, measuring the country's 65 largest cities, Mr. Letterman had a 4 rating on Monday to Mr. Leno's 3.8. (Each point is worth 787,659 households.)." Of course, Leno still won the first half-hour. But once they brought the guests out, Letterman had America's favorite Oscar-whoring not-funny-anymore superstar Tom Hanks! Leno had Ron Paul. Enough to win an unscientific online poll, yes, but not to beat Forrest Gump in Nielsen households. So writers finally have some proof that their contributions are important! Specifically, their contribution of a sad picket line that SAG members and bleeding-heart superstars will hopefully continue to refuse to cross. [NYT]

· Click the above image for our video recap of last night's various acts of talk-show-host facial hair removal, in which a unibrow is plucked, a Moses-beard shredded, and a drifter-thicket shaved. At least Conan still seems committed to resisting the siren call of his razor until his writers return.
· The Carpetbagger finds the Golden Globes credentialing desk to be the loneliest place in the world.
· In this case at least, The Spy Who Licked Me doesn't refer to some kind of pornographic reimagining of 007's adventures in Her Majesty's sexy service.
· Somehow, we forgot that it's Zahara's birthday. The middle children always get lost in the shuffle.

On the same night that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned to their shows sans writers, David Letterman, one of two late night hosts with his writing staff, finally shaved off his strike beard. With the help of a barber and a straight razor, Letterman returned from the commercial break with a smooth (if slightly bloodied) face. Also: Letterman guest Mike Huckabee, who graced Leno's first scabby show back from strike hiatus, got the coveted 12:30 a.m. segment, usually reserved for the return from the commercial break after the band plays in order to say goodnight and run credits. Burn?

Sad news for the bear-chasers and drifter-fetishists who'd been so delighted by returning Late Show host David Letterman's recent facial hair growth: On tonight's show, Letterman will announce an on-air beard-shaving stunt scheduled for Monday that will restore his face to its smooth-as-Paul-Shaffer's-head, pre-strike state. Those who fear their newfound attraction to the comedian will fade with each tragic swipe of a barber's blade should make sure they set their TiVos to record tonight's program, lest they find themselves separated from the hirsute object of their late-night affection until CBS is ready to start rerunning these sure-to-be wildly popular "Letterbear" episodes. [NY Daily News]