A reconsidered Dick

Here's a tribute to Dick Cavett, written by critic and poet Clive James. As kind of a follow-up to my post last month about how most talk show hosts today haven't got the sense (or security) to just sit, listen, and let a guest talk. Sample:

Before the American host sits down with his first guest, he must first be a ­stand-­up comedian: a joke teller. Cavett, having started as a writer, understood that condition well. But in his career on camera he was always more interested in the stuff that came after the monologue: the conversation with the guest. In this, he was different from Carson and anyone else who has followed in Carson's tradition, right up to the present day. Even Carson could be spontaneously funny if the guest (or his groveling feed man, Ed McMahon) opened an opportunity—the clumsier the guest, the more opportunities there were—but it was strictly counterpunching. Carson's successor on The Tonight Show, Jay Leno, does without the stooge but works the same way: The core of his technique is stand-­up joke-telling, and he keeps in shape by taking cabaret dates all over America. (When I was his guest in Los Angeles, he fired off jokes one after the other. I did my best to come back at him, but it wasn't a conversation: more like ­mouth-­to-­mouth assassination.) Of the star hosts currently operating, David Letterman comes closest to Cavett's ­easy-­seeming urbanity, but Letterman, for all his quickness of reflex, takes a lot of time to tell a story—with much eye-­popping and many an audience-­milking "Whoo!" and "Uh-huh!" Conan O'Brien, when he was starting out, gave you the best idea of what Cavett's unemphatic poise used to be like; but, as he completes his climb to stardom, he allows himself an ­ever-­increasing ration of havin'-fun hollerin'. It's an imperative of the business, and Cavett defied it at his peril.