Above is a segment from Friday night's episode of "The Late Show With David Letterman," which had to rank as one of its more unusual. I'm not a regular viewer of the program, but when I saw who the guest was and the intent of the program, I wasn't going to miss it.
I guess that means I can't speak of its peculiarity with unflappable confidence, but I'm sure it's not every night Letterman's guest is the mother of a deceased comedian.
I'm willing to wager it's even more rare when the reason is to apologize for a 15-plus-year-old decision to completely excise the mother's child from his show and then subsequently broadcast the deleted material.
But cutting Bill Hicks from "The Late Show" was a wrong Letterman had to right. His long-overdue mea culpa for chopping the late comedian's skit out of the Oct. 1, 1993, edition finally came with Hicks' mother, Mary, in the hot seat. She earned a few laughs of her own, retelling a story about the time her son sent her and her husband into a "fish out of water" situation at an Eric Johnson concert.
It was a bittersweet ending to the story which came to define Hicks' career, a man who was beloved in England but couldn't even get on the air in America.
What was Letterman's excuse after all this time? "I had no real reason," as he put it. Uh huh. Sure, Dave.
Hicks' perspective is well-documented: "Standards and practices" phoned him hours after the performance to tell him he was axed for jokes about abortion and religion. Armed with that knowledge, it made Letterman's willingness to jump on the grenade 15-plus years after the fact an attempt to seem like the self-effacing hero.
I don't mean to suggest he seemed disingenuous, though. I believe he was quite sincere. "It was an error of judgment on my part. It was just a mistake," he said.
Later, when Mary Hicks was on his couch, he apologized to her and the Hicks family. "I will tell you that that was a very hard time 15 years ago when that happened," she confessed.
After a commercial break, Letterman aired the famed lost segment. And there he was. Bill appeared clad in a brown sports jacket and canary dress shirt, trying to stray, as he did near the end, from his black-clad "dark poet" persona. He ranted on the stage of the Ed Sullivan Theatre for several minutes, rattling off an all-too-familiar sketch to any Hicks fan with a copy of his Rant in E-Minor.
Letterman cautioned the material might be dated, but most of it was still oddly relevant. It was odd to think how things turned out for two targets of his vitriol, Billy Ray Cyrus and "Marky Mark" Wahlberg, one father to a teenage star and the other an Oscar-nominated actor. Letterman noted in his closing remarks that the footage didn't seem as dated as he'd anticipated. "I guess this speaks to the suggestion that he was ahead of his time."
Less than five months after the incident, Hicks died from pancreatic cancer. He was 32. The Oct. 1, 1993, taping marked his final performance intended for a nationally televised audience.