His revolution was televised

"Paul, can we have some dialing music?" David Letterman would ask, and his bandleader would twinkle a melody on the keyboard as the host plopped a rotary phone on his desk and began calling whomever: CBS chief Les Moonves; an office drone named Meg in a building across the street; his mom, Dorothy, in her kitchen in Indiana.

In the span of one hour, he could ask for dialing music and then commission the destruction of an automobile by dropping bowling balls off the Ed Sullivan Theater.

Markoe, a writer, met Dave in 1978 at the Comedy Store, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, and became a profound comic influence (and, for years, his girlfriend).

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.

Besides giving Markoe her due, Zinoman honors the contributions of director Hal Gurnee, who brought a fast-moving and ever-changing visual rhythm to the otherwise staid late-night format; featured player Chris Elliott, whose volatility was a combustible foil for Letterman's eternal nonplussedness; and writers such as George Meyer, a comic essentialist who proposed what Letterman later called "the single most brilliant idea on the show ever": a contest between a humidifier and dehumidifier.

Like an anthropologist, Zinoman plots Letterman on a continuum, describing — without sounding like an encyclopedist — how "Tonight Show" hosts Jack Paar and Steve Allen set the stage for him; how Letterman first thrived as the dark, ironic counterpoint to Reagan's "morning in America"; and how this, in turn, prepared the world for the incisive comedy of "The Simpsons," Garry Shandling, "Seinfeld," Tina Fey — and for any art or artist that thrives on the inane and the self-referential, the subversion of his or her chosen...