Letterman

Author: Jason Zinoman

Release: April 11, 2017

Tagline: The Last Giant of Late Night

Publisher: Harper

Genre: Biography, Television, History, Comedy

ISBN-10: 0062377213
ISBN-13: 978-0062377210

Declassified by Agent Palmer: Zinoman’s biography of David Letterman should make your Top Ten list on Late Night

Quotes and Lines

Letterman fixated on technical problems or what he saw was an error in booking or a botched punch line. He never enjoyed the successes and scrutinized every failure, musing darkly about the implications and pivoting from self-criticism to despair in a blink.

What David Letterman was truly committed to was a lack of commitment. His defining feature was not scorn for actors or revulsion towards the theater of the media, but how he surrounded himself with layers of ironic distance, creating an elusive and detached style that had become the quintessential Letterman pose.

Years before the term “Generation X” moved into circulation, David Letterman made ironic detachment seem like the most sensible way to approach the world.

You might say that Late Night with David Letterman became what happened when one talk-show host stopped being polite and started getting real.

For his whole life, Letterman maintained a ferocious fear of failure, but that didn’t mean success made him happy.

“In the old show, we always celebrated failure,” Morton said. “Now we celebrated success.”

Making the best case for his final years, Kaplan argued that Letterman had finally leveled with his audience and showed us his true, confused self. “Finally , Letterman had merged Steve Allen’s absurdity, Jack Paar’s neurotic confessionalism, and Caron’s topicality,” he wrote.

Late-night television isn’t even for late night anymore.