efficiency-experts

Stop David Letterman if You've Heard This One Before (Hint: You Have)

STV ยท 04/04/08 02:35PM

Click to viewOur poor, blog-addled attention spans are often too fried to catch TV hosts recycling other people's material, let alone their own. But a quick-witted tipster pointed out how David Letterman made it easy over the last two nights, setting a remarkable new joke-recycling standard almost too good to be true. Which is to say: This can't possibly have happened on a major late-night talk show, could it? It's not as though they're verbatim plagiarizations โ€” at least the one-word punchlines to his identical Eliot Spitzer gags were changed โ€” but with an overlap of about 90 percent and a facial-expression redundancy rate near 100, we're wondering who Letterman's rehashed joke is actually on. Moreover, with rain today in New York, will it "feel like spring" yet again tonight? [CBS, video by Molly McAleer]