He needs a spoon full of sugar.
David Letterman revealed that a “fan” recently mistook him for Dick Van Dyke.
“Here’s what happens to me now — people used to know who I am, and now I have to wear a name tag to get anything going,” the former “The Late Show with David Letterman” host, 78, said during “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Wednesday.
Letterman hosted “The Late Show” from 1993 to 2015. Since then, he’s hosted the Netflix show “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman,” and he’s grown a bushy white beard.
He recalled an incident when he was recently at a farmer’s market.
“A guy comes up to me and he says, ‘Excuse me, are you who I think you are?’ And now, I’m all loaded up and I respond, ‘Well, that depends on who you think I are.’ That always gets a big laugh,” he explained.
“I said, ‘Who do you think I am?’ He said, ‘Dick Van Dyke,’ and I said, ‘No! What?!’”
Van Dyke is also an industry giant and a titan of comedy, but he’s twenty years older than Letterman, as he’s about to turn 100 on Dec. 13.
To mark the occasion, PBS will debut the “American Masters – Starring Dick Van Dyke” documentary on Friday ( 9 p.m.). It addresses his eight-decade career and what director John Scheinfeld described as Van Dyke’s “personal demons with alcohol” during the height of his fame.
“I’ve done a lot of these on famous people, and almost always there’s somebody who will say, ‘Oh, I didn’t like him’ or ‘He did this, or she did that,’” Scheinfeld told The Post. “In the ten months we were working on this, there was not one person who had a bad thing to say about Dick.”
Zach Baylin and Kate Susman – who created the Jude Law and Jason Bateman Netflix drama “Black Rabbit” – told The Post that while they were filming in New York City, Letterman crashed their set.
“We were camped out in front of David Letterman’s apartment in Tribeca, and he just was coming home and just happened to stumble upon set,” Susman recalled.
She said that Letterman “ended up sitting behind the monitors and watching for a while, which was super cool. I think he had been locked out of his apartment, which is why he was on the street.”
During his “JKL!” appearance, Letterman told Kimmel, 58, “When I was your age, people my age and younger would come up to me and say, ‘We watch the show every night, we love it.’”
He recounted that when he left, people then said to him, “’Oh, we miss you.’ And then it would be, ‘Oh, my mother watches you now every night, and she really misses you now that you’re gone.’”
The comedian said, “Lately it’s, ‘You know what, I’d like a picture of you to show to my grandfather, and his father also, because we used to watch it together in the hospital.’ Just like that.”
