Ozzy Osbourne and David Letterman Broke Down Bat-Biting Debacle

Late Night With David Letterman had only been on the air for two months when it demonstrated how it might do things a little differently than Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. While Carson’s guests in late March 1982 included Walter Matthau, Shelley Winters and Scatman Crothers, Letterman was sitting down with Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne for an extended conversation. 

Osbourne, whose family announced his death this week at age 76, was never a guest on Carson’s show, but Letterman welcomed him with open arms. “You don’t look like a madman,” the comedian said by way of greeting.

“I can assure you I am,” Osbourne replied, eyes darting around the studio.

Enough with the formalities. “Let’s get to it,” Letterman said. He wanted to hear about the legend of Ozzy biting the head off a bat during a live concert in Des Moines, Iowa.

The story was true, Osbourne said, although it was “a sheer accident.” According to the rock star, a lot of weird people attended his concerts. One of those ticket-buying misfits threw a bat onto the stage during a performance. Osbourne claimed he mistook it for a toy, which doesn’t exactly explain why he grabbed the thing and bit off its noggin.

“Suddenly everybody’s freaking out because the real bat on stage goes, like, asleep,” Osbourne said, even though most animals sleep with their heads still attached.

So Osbourne believed the bat was a toy, Letterman confirmed.

“Yeah,” Ozzy replied, “but I can assure you, the rabies shots that I went through afterwards aren’t fun.”

An innocent mistake? Maybe, but Letterman noted that it wasn’t the first time Osbourne had bitten the head off a flying creature. Was it a pigeon? A dove?

“I was kind of peckish,” Osbourne explained. “There was a pigeon there. So I thought, well, nothing else but the pigeon. I mean, the pigeon didn’t mind because he had no choice.”

Letterman squirmed, rethinking his original assertion that Osbourne didn’t appear to be a madman. “We don’t want to spend all our time discussing you biting the heads off stuff,” he said, “but why would you want to do that?”

Osbourne complained that everybody put him down for the practice. “The thing is, Colonel Sanders, how many chickens you think he put to death? He didn’t bite the heads off, but everybody else did.”

In recent years, Osbourne had come to terms with the fact that bat-biting would be his rock-and-roll legacy after he passed. “I know when I eventually do leave this place, it's going to be, ‘Ah, the man who bit the head off the bat — he joined the bat today,’” he told People in 2023. “I mean, I’ve achieved quite a lot in my life, but all people do is go, ‘Ozzy, what do bats really taste like?’”