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The most ambitious reinvention Dave and his team did adopt in the months before Conan’s hour-long time shift was much more throwback than leap forward. He started telling more—lots more—monologue jokes.

For most of his run at CBS Dave had averaged about eight jokes a night—more than he had during his Late Night days at NBC (three or four, tops), but still nothing like the fusillade (thirtyish) Jay was firing off every night. In trying to keep the show as much Dave as possible, while also not requiring him to run around town on his time off as he used to do during the nineties, the staff looked to the opening monologue as a target of opportunity.

In their no-concessions way, Letterman’s team had for years resisted any notion that Jay was the master monologist and hence the natural heir to Carson in that regard. Dave had just as much talent for standing on that mark and delivering a finely crafted one-liner, they argued. Of course, Jay pounded his point home every night in a gag barrage, and Letterman himself had never hesitated to grant Jay his props as a stand-up; Dave would routinely say Jay had been the best he’d seen at the joke-telling craft. In the meantime, Dave limited his nightly joke total, believing it was better to tell a few polished jokes than spray the room with a joke hose.

In the early days, however, Dave did fill the show with those ambitious cutting-edge comedy concepts. Not only was he disinclined to do them anymore, but it now seemed those innovations that he had introduced had all become staples of everyone else’s late-night shows. Conan went everywhere, from bartending school to Finland. Jimmy Kimmel had a recurring piece at a black barber shop that scored for him every time. Jay sent his “Ross the Intern” character to the same places—award shows, big sporting events—where Dave had sent his stage manager, Biff Henderson, for years. If those ideas were now to be relegated to the scrapbooks, then Letterman needed something else to freshen the show. So the monologue made a comeback.

“It was so hot in New York that when I was driving home last night, the navigation lady says to me, ‘So you want to stop for a beer?’ ”

“It was an especially fine day today, a day like a New York cabdriver: only a slight chance of a shower.”

“Jenna Bush is getting married over the weekend. I thought this was nice. For their wedding night, President Bush is loaning the groom his ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner.”

Only privately did some Letterman acolytes mention one ulterior motive for the new direction: It might be another way to distinguish Dave from Conan, who had never done all that nightclub slogging—basic training in the art of monologue.

In mid-2008 another factor was compelling Dave to add jokes at the top of the show. It was a presidential election year, populated with a host of characters inviting comment every night, from John McCain and Hillary Clinton to side players like John Edwards, Fred Thompson, and, once the summer hit, Sarah Palin—all of them offering rich material for monologues.

“At last night’s debate John McCain brought up Barack Obama’s relationship with sixties radical William Ayers. Then Barack Obama brought up McCain’s relationship with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.”

Letterman found himself at the center of the news on September 24, during the height of the presidential race, when McCain, who was scheduled to make his thirteenth appearance as a guest, abruptly canceled because he said he was being forced to suspend his campaign to rush to Washington to deal with the collapsing economy.

Dave first made some generous remarks about McCain, citing his war heroism and noting that the senator had called him personally to apologize for this last-minute emergency that was forcing him to cancel. McCain had actually announced his plan to run for president on Letterman’s show in 2007; the two men had a comfortable relationship.

But then Dave learned that McCain, instead of rushing to the airport, had turned up at CBS News headquarters for a quick sit-down