Life & Wisdom Quote by Harvey Pekar

Pekar’s genius was always in treating small talk like a battleground, and this line has that same bristly minimalism: a shrug that doubles as a jab. “Letterman... he got his problems” sounds like a Midwestern aside you’d hear at the deli counter, but it’s really Pekar staking out his whole ethos against late-night America’s smoothing machine. Letterman isn’t named as a villain; he’s diagnosed like a neighbor with a bad attitude. That’s the move: Pekar refuses the glamour of a grand feud and instead reduces celebrity conflict to ordinary irritation.

The subtext is power. Letterman represents the gatekeeping platform that can turn “authenticity” into a segment, a quirky morsel for the audience to consume between commercials. Pekar, the patron saint of unvarnished grievance, didn’t just resist being a lovable oddball; he resented the premise that he needed to be lovable at all. So “We don’t get along too well” becomes a polite-sounding admission of incompatibility between two kinds of performance: Letterman’s ironic detachment and Pekar’s insistence that daily life is not a bit.

Context matters because Pekar’s public persona was built on friction. His comics made a career out of refusing narrative uplift, and his TV appearances were famously tense, sometimes veering into open sabotage of the host’s script. The ellipsis after “Letterman...” is the pause of someone deciding how much truth to risk on the record. He chooses just enough to keep the edge sharp, and just plain enough to make it land.