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David Letterman Speaks Candidly About the State of Late-Night Comedy and His 2009 Sex Scandal

He also says he wasn't involved in choosing Stephen Colbert as his successor.

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David Letterman's DGAF attitude has become more apparent in the waning episodes of The Late Show. Even he's noticed the difference, telling The New York Times: "There's a difference between regular-season hockey and playoff hockey. And I'm not in the playoffs." This regular-season mentality shocked fans when he made a sexist joke last week during the show's warmup.

The Times was there for the remark but didn't seem to think much of it, meaning A. it wasn't as big of a deal as it was made out to be or B. the paper didn't want to sully its candid, parting Q&A with Letterman. The soon-to-be jobless comedian gave the Times quite a bit, commenting on the current late-night field and his 2009 sex scandal. Here are some of the excerpts from the interview:

On not capitalizing on the Internet as much as Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel:

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"It sneaked up on me and went right by. People on the staff said, 'You know what would be great is if you would join Twitter.' And I recognized the value of it. It’s just, I didn’t know what to say. You go back to your parents’ house, and they still have the rotary phone. It’s a little like that."

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On if he had any involvement in choosing Stephen Colbert as his successor​:

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"No. Not my show. When we sign off, we’re out of business with CBS. I always thought Jon Stewart would have been a good choice. And then Stephen. And then I thought, well, maybe this will be a good opportunity to put a black person on, and it would be a good opportunity to put a woman on. Because there are certainly a lot of very funny women that have television shows everywhere. So that would have made sense to me as well."

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On if he thought he'd lose his job in the fallout from his sex scandal:

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"Looking at it now, yes, I think they would have had good reason to fire me. But at the time, I was largely ignorant as to what, really, I had done. It just seemed like, O.K., well, here’s somebody who had an intimate relationship with somebody he shouldn’t have had an intimate relationship with. And I always said, 'Well, who hasn’t?' to myself. But then, when I was able to see from the epicenter, the ripples, I thought, yeah, they could have fired me. But they didn’t. So I owe them that."

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Head over to NYT to read the entire interview.

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