There’s a scene in Clear And Present Danger, one of my favorite shoot-em-up-go-boom movies, where the president is being advised to distance himself from a friend who has been found murdered because of his involvement with a drug cartel.

But Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford at his most earnestly Boy Scouty) advises him to own his friendship with the guy, therefore beating the press to the punch. Why? “There’s no use defusing a bomb that’s already gone off.”

The Late Show’s David Letterman would seem to be following the Jack Ryan plan to defusing the public relations bomb that, handled differently, might have blown his career and comic credibility sky-high.

Instead of waiting for the media to break the news that he had sexual relationships with female employees and was the target of an alleged extortion plot by a former CBS producer, he came clean on his own show. It was one of the more surreal and uncomfortable moments on late-night TV since … well, since Hugh Grant came clean on The Tonight Show about picking up a hooker.

This week, the Mea Culpa Train kept rolling as Letterman publicly apologized to his wife, Regina Lasko, and to women on his staff, for the pain his indiscretions may have caused them. He even apologized again to Sarah Palin and her family, who he already apologized to earlier this year for a tacky and unfunny joke he made about her teen daughter.

With all that apologizing, Letterman enjoyed a ratings spike on Monday. I wouldn’t be surprised if that spike continued for a little while, because viewers might be riveted, wondering whether the show’s going to become Apologalooza.

Next scandal will answer questions

What a lot of people are wondering about, though, is what’s going to happen the next time that a public person does something he has to apologize for. Is Letterman, as has been his practice, going to make very pointed fun, or is he going to lay off lest he look like a hypocrite?

Part of what late-night hosts do, after all, is joke about the news, and, of course, Letterman’s made a career of that. That hasn’t escaped his critics. The blog IHateMedia.com compiled a Letterman-esque Top 10 list called “Top 10 Hypocritical David Letterman Lines About Other People’s Sex Scandals,” including the Palin joke, four jokes about Idaho Sen. Larry Craig and his public restroom shenanigans, and, of course, a Clinton joke, which was, honestly, meaner to Monica Lewinsky than it was to the former president.

Of course, Letterman is an entertainer whom nobody elected to anything. That said, viewers invite late-night hosts into their homes every night as friends who can make sense of the world around them, or make fun of it.

But are we less inclined to laugh at a sin that mirrors one that our friend made? How would you take a joke about cheating from a friend whose cheating was front-page news? Would it seem knowing or hypocritical?
I remember Craig Ferguson of CBS’ The Late Late Show, who is a recovered alcoholic, explaining why he wouldn’t be making any more Britney Spears jokes, because he suspected something wasn’t right with her and he knew what she was going through. But that hasn’t stopped him from joking about other people. Will Letterman be compelled to make the same qualification, and if he does, is he going to be comically neutered?
What will the public response be the next time Letterman, either in a monologue or in an interview, goes after the next contestant on “Wheel of Scandal?”

And if we have to think about it, is it ever going to be funny?

~ leslie_streeter@pbpost.com