The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
How Letterman remade TV
On television, there was something remote and unknowable about David Letterman. He was a nimble entertainer and a world-class grump, a complete stranger with one of America’s most recognizable faces.
Jason Zinoman, in his definitive and enjoyable biography “Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night,” demystifies the host. A comedy columnist for the New York Times, Zinoman walks the line between reportage and criticism, and shifts between historian, clinician and fan boy without grinding the clutch too much. His studious research is spiced by an enduring appreciation of Letterman’s work and salted by the cataloguing of the host’s lesssavory traits and behavior.
So what makes Letterman “the last giant,” as opposed to his eternal rival Jay Leno, who beat him to the “Tonight Show” desk? There are two answers. The first is that Letterman is simply funnier. The second answer is formal in nature. The book maps, move by move, how Letterman’s 33-year run reinvented late-night television.
“He created a new comic vocabulary that expanded our cultural sense of humor,” Zinoman writes, “and made a persuasive case for the daily talk show as an ambitious art form.” Carson’s “Tonight Show” was entertainment. Letterman’s show was also art.
The distinction between art and entertainment is embodied by Merrill Markoe, who is the oftforgotten mother of Letterman’s career. Markoe, a writer, met Dave in 1978 and became a profound comic influence. She adored formal experimentation and was less keen on satire than on writing and producing comedy that baffled, disoriented and colored outside the lines.
Markoe was responsible for segments like “Viewer Mail,” “Small Town News” and “Stupid Pet Tricks.” She pushed the host to do remotes, which sent Letterman out of the studio and into unpredictable public situations.
In this way, the book is more a biography of a concept and its execution than of an individual and his evolution. Zinoman plots the outside cultural forces at work on Letterman’s shows and tags the people who used the host as an avatar for their own comic sensibilities.
At no point, however, does Letterman seem like the giant of the book’s subtitle, at least not in a reverential sense. Zinoman’s great achievement is rendering Letterman as utterly human, even subhuman at times, and charting his show as an irregular comic pilgrimage — if not toward comic excellence than at least toward comic insolence.