On Thursday David Letterman announced that he was going to be retiring from The Late Show at some point next year.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n I grew up in the Age of Letterman, and I have to say that I view his pending retirement as good news. Over the years my encounters with the Late Show have become sporadic and accidental. It wasn\u2019t just the format that seemed dusty, but Letterman himself looked a little bit old, sometimes even disheveled, and his performance recalled a different era, the man having somehow morphed from being the smartest, edgiest guy in the room to a beloved uncle repeating jokes after Christmas dinner. It wasn\u2019t pathetic, just a little bit sad, like noticing somebody you love age and becoming a smaller, more vulnerable version of himself.<\/p>\n Once a revolutionary who brought irony into the mainstream, he now seems lost in time, usurped by all his competitors who have an organic sense and mastery of social media. Of course, when Letterman started, he was the undisputed champion of improvisational videos, bits that would have played brilliantly on the Internet, but the fact that he was both before and of his time, is no matter,<\/p>\n