Watch David Letterman’s Surprise Appearance on ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’
David Letterman was famously denied the chance to take over The Tonight Show when Johnny Carson retired in 1992, but he made his way to the show 33 years later on Monday evening when he crashed the stage midway through Jimmy Fallon‘s opening monologue. “Oh my God, David Letterman!” Fallon said in mock surprise. “What are you doing here?”
“Is this the 23rd hour of The Today Show?” Letterman asked Fallon. “Jimmy?!”
He then turned to Paul Shaffer, who was serving as the guest musical director along with former members of the CBS Orchestra, and asked what he was doing there. “It’s a funny story,” Shaffer said. “Have you ever taken too much Ambien and you wind up somewhere and have no clue how you got there?”
In reality, Shaffer and the band were filling in for the Roots as they prepared for the massive Saturday Night Live anniversary event at Radio City Music Hall. “Paul and I used to do a show almost exactly like this,” Letterman told Fallon. “We didn’t do the Chuck E. Cheese crap, but it’s very similar.”
Letterman then rejected the chance to tell some jokes after combing through the cue cards, and instead agreed to film a Tortilla Challenge TikTok video that involved repeatedly slamming Fallon in the face with tortillas. “I’m not promoting violence,” Letterman said. “This is just a TikTok thing.”
The surreal Letterman appearance lasted a mere four minutes. Two years ago, they spent significantly more time together when Letterman appeared on Strike Force Five, a limited podcast series that Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver hosted together during the Writer’s Guide of America strike. It provided Colbert with an opportunity to finally talk about the awkward period when CBS head Les Moonves first approached him about taking over Letterman’s job at CBS.
“He starts talking about how he likes [The Colbert Report], and they’re thinking about 11:30 and what they’re going to do after you,” Colbert told Letterman. “I said, ‘I need to just stop right here and say that’s lovely you would want to talk to me. This was never in the plan for me. But if we’re really going to have this conversation, I need to know that Dave knows about it. I can’t have this conversation if Dave doesn’t know that these conversations are going on.’”
Letterman shared his side of the story. “I would have conversations with Les from time to time about how much longer I would be at the network, but they were always general,” Letterman said. “I don’t recall ever talking to him about ‘Please start the search, begin talking to people.’ I’m certain that that part didn’t happen. He probably inferred that from our general conversations.”
Letterman has kept busy since stepping away from late-night duties in 2015, most notably in his Netflix series, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, with David Letterman. His most recent guests were Miley Cyrus and Charles Barkley.