The Night David Letterman Threw a Pencil and Found a Running Gag

Three months into Late Night with David Letterman, a Viewer Mail question arrived from Kirk Hancock, who wrote on behalf of “the guys in my dorm.” The joke is credited to original Late Night writer Stephen Winer, though he tells LateNighter he didn’t think much of it at the time. “I didn’t think it was a great joke even then,” Winer says. But Letterman broke two more windows that night, then threw three more pencils the next day. “The audience was four times larger,” former head writer Steve O’Donnell recalled in Brian Abrams’ And Now… An Oral History of Late Night with David Letterman.