I always thought he was a tad younger.
Although Letterman had been around for some years, popping up from time to time on the Tonight Show and writing scripts for sitcoms such as Good Times, I only “discovered” him as a kid in 1980. During that Summer, NBC oddly canceled their game shows to give him a block of 90 minutes to do his ill-fated talk/comedy show. I recall it was pretty awful and the fake guest bits frequently bombed, thus, no one lamented its cancellation by Fall. Then he had a new show that followed Johnny Carson within two years. I was one of those people (albeit a cynical tweener) who was part of the chorus stating he’d fail again and how could NBC be so stupid. Lame and frequently unfunny SNL took shots at his show multiple times with the 1982-83 cast. Joe Piscopo’s imitation of Letterman was quite funny and accurate despite SNL resorting to petty sniping.
Thankfully some people at NBC had the patience to let David Letterman and his team develop their talents. He was funny…in the right time slot which was later in the evening when college students were awake and teenagers could stay up during vacation periods. One of the first things my brother and I did with the first VCR our parents bought was record episodes of Letterman. After the move to North Dakota, I managed to catch him more often since Beulah was in the Mountain Time Zone with its cable TV feed coming from the Central section of the state. We couldn’t get enough of him crushing things with a steamroller, flattening a Mr. T doll in a hydraulic press or dropping rubber gloves filled with pudding off a tall building. He took chances too. I will always remember his prank calls to the Soviet consulate in NYC, demonstrating if a suit made of velcro would actually work and how bewildered a recently naturalized Ah-nold was when they said he won a new car for passing David’s US History quiz.