The First Ever Late Night with David Letterman Christmas Special Happened in July

Here's a bit of vintage trivia for you television historians. The first-ever Late Night with David Letterman Christmas show happened in 1982... in July. 

The joke was, as Letterman explained in the opening monologue, "Ever since I was a small boy, it has been a dream of mine to have the first network Christmas special of the season." So they beat everyone else by several months and committed to the premise for the entire episode.

This show, which you can view in its entirety here, was also notable for a snafu that completely ruined (or enhanced, depending on how much you enjoy watching trainwrecks) the segment that starts at about the 35 minute mark. Longtime stock character Larry "Bud" Melman (Calvert DeForest), who incidentally cold opened the show with a great speech about all the cherished holiday traditions that involve riding around on a bus, was supposed to read "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" to a bunch of children, but he's given the wrong book to read from... and he is not a man who improvises well.

This was only five months into the show's run, which is only one month longer than Letterman's previous morning show had lasted before being cancelled, so things were still fairly dicey and the show and staff were still getting their footing. At the end of this clip, Letterman archivist Don Giller handily includes a post-mortem segment from the following show, where the production assistants responsible for the mix-up explained what went wrong, with their identities were concealed to "protect their future careers."

Late Night with David Letterman ran from 1982 until 1993 on NBC. 

Andy Hunsaker has a head full of sitcom gags and nerd-genre lore, and can be followed @AndyHunsaker if you're into that sort of thing.