King of comedy
It all came down to the gap between his two front teeth. When David Letterman first appeared as a talk show host on network television in the early 1980s, the idea that this glib, goofy new guy would put some distance between himself and the traditional role of the television talk show host was broadcast right there in his mischievous grin: He didn’t bother to get his teeth fixed.
“Late Night With David Letterman” had models, of course: the absurd funny bone of Steve Allen, the acerbity of Jack Paar, Johnny Carson’s polished delight in flubs and failed jokes. Not to mention countless local amateurs.
But Letterman was different: “the host who didn’t believe in hosting,” writes Jason Zinoman, the New York Times’ comedy critic, in “Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night.” A neurotic, prickly, intensely private man, Zinoman’s subject would be an unlikely one for a compelling biography, were it not for the fact that his on-air irreverence defined a generation: he “became the face of an ironic sensibility that permeated comedy, television, and popular culture.”
Letterman’s marathon run on your television screen — 33 years, first on NBC (“Late Night With David Letterman”), then CBS (“Late Show”) — was the product of a revolving cast of writers who dreamed up cockamamie concepts that would become TV institutions, from Stupid Pet Tricks and the Top Ten List to the recurring guest spots of the hapless actor who played doughy everyman Larry “Bud” Melman. It was patently ridiculous, all of it.
“We thought we had all the answers,” as Letterman would recall. “We thought television had made a huge mistake and we would fix it.”
In fact, as Zinoman points out, Letterman’s show covered three distinct eras, from the skewed perspective on TV traditions of his earliest years to the fully committed inanity of the later 1980s, followed by a long, slow descent into a focus on the host’s own bizarre, bitter psyche. Merrill Markoe, Letterman’s longtime girlfriend and head writer (not necessarily in that order), summed it up when she told an incoming staff member the real name of the show was “Dave’s Attitude Problem.”
Inevitably, the book takes on the rhythm of chronology: And then this happened on the show, and then that happened on the show. (The author writes that he originally set out to watch all 6,024 late-night episodes that Letterman hosted, though that plan was thwarted by availability and, it’s safe to assume, impending delirium.) Still, Zinoman deftly demonstrates Letterman’s outsize influence with a bonanza of carefully chosen vignettes.
When the pop-punk rocker Billy Idol, at the height of his brief popularity, sat down to curl his lip at the host, he bragged that drug dealers were naming their wares after his song titles.
“You must be a very proud young man,” Letterman deadpanned.
It was two seconds of adlibbing that epitomized the mark (bruise?) that Letterman left on the culture. Another host, apologetically uncool, may have simply milked the exchange to make himself the butt of the joke. But Letterman’s heavy sarcasm “flipped the script of the rebellious rock ’n’ roller shocking the conformist,” Zinoman writes. “He made Idol look like a poseur, a guy trying too hard. They were both fakes, but at least he was willing to admit it.”
To quibble, the book might have benefited from a little more context. There’s a good deal of Letterman’s idol, Carson, whose “Tonight Show” replacement gig the younger man bitterly lost to his former friend, Jay Leno. But Zinoman is careful not to tread too deeply onto the same turf of “The Late Shift,” Bill Carter’s investigation into the backroom deliberations that led to Letterman’s mid-career jump to CBS. Other figures in the continuing late-night ratings chase — Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart — get, for the most part, cursory cameos.
In the end Letterman, affectionately known in his heyday as just “Dave” to the people who grew up on his shows, fascinates largely because he’s apparently unknowable. On the back nine of his career he drew praise for his sincere reactions to 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, as well as his stark on-air admission of his infidelity to his wife around the time of the birth of his only son.
But those were exceptions. Letterman’s biographer likens the television world that became the host’s life to an early form of reality programming, cast with stock characters — the phony (bandleader Paul Shaffer), the doddering fool (Bud Melman), even Letterman’s own exasperating mother.
At the center of it all was the star of the show, “the ornery, aggrieved employee, furious at his bosses, an eccentric you could identify with.” And that was long before he grew the beard.