“We thought we had all the answers,” as Letterman would recall. 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. 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.”
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