David Letterman Pokes Fun at the 0.1 Percent

Mr. McCall said he did not see any hypocrisy in someone as well off as Mr. Letterman taking comedic aim at issues of financial inequity and wealth distribution. “George Soros is a liberal, too,” he said. “You don’t have to be stupid and poor to be a liberal.”

But Mr. Letterman admitted to a certain cognitive dissonance underlying his involvement in “This Land.”

“I would make fun of myself, first and foremost, in this equation,” he said. “I think you’re allowed to make fun of dopes, whether they’re dopes with too much money or dopes in Congress.”

Mr. Letterman said he understood that the book could be politically barbed in a way that the “Late Show” can’t really accommodate.

David Letterman has a satirical book out today called This Land Was Made for You and Me (But Mostly Me), which pokes fun at the 0.1 percent (the tagline for the book is “Billionaires in the Wild”), and talked to the New York Times about it with illustrator Bruce McCall. If you are a New Yorker subscriber, you may have seen a preview of this book in last month’s “money issue.”

The reporter also asked Letterman if working on the book made him think about giving to charitable causes more, and Letterman replies, reasonably, that he does, yes, but also: “I’m not going to tell you what it is, because I’m from the old school where if you start talking about it, you’re not doing it for the right reason.”

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