When comedian David Letterman retired from The Late Show, he really retired. He hasn’t done much of anything publicly, probably because he was trying to turn into Santa Claus.
Photos of Letterman jogging along the beach in St. Barts surfaced online today. According to the New York Daily News, they were taken on March 22. If you weren’t told that the man in the photos was Letterman, you wouldn’t have known. He’s balding and has kept his big Santa Claus beard growing.
Letterman retired from the Late Show in May 2015, handing the late night CBS show to Stephen Colbert.
The beard is a way for Letterman to get his revenge on the television industry, which forced him to shave his beard every single day for 33 years. In a December 2015 interview with Whitefish Review, Letterman said he hated shaving. The first thing he planned to do after retirement was stop shaving, no matter how much his wife or son hated it.
“And I know, it’s not a good-looking beard. But I don’t even care,” he said at the time. “I just don’t care. And it’s kind of fun—well, I won’t say that it’s fun to walk around irritating people, I think I’ve proved that on TV—but it’s sort of amusing to see the reactions.”