On a Night Without Audiences, the Show Goes On for Letterman and Fallon

While Hurricane Sandy shut down new late-night broadcasts from Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel (who brought his program to Brooklyn from Los Angeles for the week), two of their New York comedy colleagues were determined that the show must go on. David Letterman and Jimmy Fallon (and their very understanding crew members and celebrity guests) went ahead with their tapings, despite the absence of studio audiences and key personnel, lending an eerie intimacy to the otherwise entertaining proceedings.

At his CBS “Late Show” (which is recorded at the Ed Sullivan Theater in midtown Manhattan), Mr. Letterman read his monologue from his desk, rapidly running through a set of hurricane-themed jokes (“I come out and I say, ‘Well, so much for the drought'”) before introducing this low-fidelity version of his familiar Top 10 list: