David Letterman’s last weeks.
Now that Letterman’s a flinty codger, an establishment figure, it’s become difficult to recall just how revolutionary his style of meta-comedy once felt.
.. In a sense, Letterman was a bridge between two eras of male superstars. Like the white-guy comedians of the seventies, Bill Murray and Chevy Chase and Steve Martin, he was a smart-ass, a trickster. And yet, even in 1982, when “Late Night with David Letterman” premièred, he presaged something else, an obsession with what was authentic, the kind of preoccupation that would dominate the nineties, inflecting figures like David Foster Wallace and Kurt Cobain, famous men who were desperate for rock-star fame and then flamboyantly and publicly hated the stuff once they got it.
.. His influence spread so wide that his innovations became clichés. Once the Internet arrived, he never mastered the viral clip.