Last week David Letterman made headlines for calling the CBS executives axing The Late Show with Stephen Colbert “lying weasels” in the Times. Inflammatory, but not new. Letterman, who called CBS execs “pinheads” and “corporate weasels” when he still worked for them, is the current caretaker of a specific late-night lexicon –insults for corporate cowards – a role that has been passed down from host to host since February 11, 1960, when Jack Paar walked off Tonight after a suit censored a joke, telling the camera "there must be a better way of making a living." Paar’s quip set up a talent-versus-management dynamic that subsequent host mined, performing their independence while reflecting the resentments of their most valuable demo. Sometimes the animosity was real (in 1969 the Smothers Brothers sued CBS over their cancellation under congressional pressure) and sometimes it was kayfabe (Fallon gossiping about Lorne Michaels).
Anti-managements disses generally imply (or state) smallness, sneakiness, and stupidity. Conan O’Brien memorable went with “brainless sons of goats,” which is nice than Bill Hicks using “Satan’s little helpers.” Invariably, the implicit accusation is the same: These Brooks Brothers assholes prioritize marketing dollars over product. In the 1970s, that critique applied mostly to creative fields. Now it applies to most large American tech and tech-adjacent companies, which run ad and consumer businesses simultaneously and have spent the decade enshittifying — serving their audiences to marketers instead of serving consumers. Letterman's critique, an echo of insults lobbed at William Paley's henchmen back in the day, isn't new. It just resonates because more and more of us encounter weasels in the wild.
