Here Are the Five Words Dave Letterman Wants to Describe the Rest of His Life

At the tail end of one of the all-time great comedy careers, David Letterman has nothing left to prove — he’s simply here to impart some of the wisdom he learned from a lifetime of working in late-night television and a baseline understanding of traffic laws.

It must be a profoundly strange experience for the 77-year-old Letterman to return to the Ed Sullivan Theater and The Late Show nine years after he ended his own legendary run behind the host’s desk. Today, Stephen Colbert runs a much more muted, traditional show than Letterman’s more renegade approach to late night, so when Letterman returned to sit in the guest’s chair and indulged Colbert in a simplistic segment called “The Colbert Questionert” last night, Letterman had to inject some of the sarcasm and comic disdain that the current Late Show has been missing for nearly a decade.

During his wasted appearance on The Late Show, Letterman fielded such hard-hitting questions from his successor as “What’s the best sandwich?” and “Apples or oranges?” with a fitting amount of derision, but our favorite answer of his came when Colbert asked him to “Describe the rest of your life in five words.” 

Said Letterman, “Do everything I possibly can to stop people at intersections from motioning for me to go first.”

Another one of our other favorite snappy answers from Letterman to Colbert's stupid questions included his response to the query, “What do you think happens when we die,” to which Letterman retorted, “People won’t quiz me with nonsensical questions.”

At 77 years of age, there’s no telling how many more times Letterman will return to The Late Show, and it’s sad that there’s a very real threat that Colbert may have wasted the all-time greatest Late Show host’s last appearance on the show that highlighted his genius for 22 years by making him choose a “favorite smell.”

But, with whatever time Letterman has left, I hope no one else wastes it by waving him across a four-way stop when they should be getting on with it themselves.