We don’t know how to talk to each other these days, and that includes those who are paid to do the talking. The current generation of late-night talk show hosts, supposedly professional conversationalists, fail miserably at the job. Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show is awkward, giggly, and forced in his enthusiasms, while Stephen Colbert on The Late Show is stern, plodding, and ponderous. Credit Jimmy Kimmel for at least having a sense of joie de vivre, but his joie is strictly from the Jackass school of extroversion: The man is no great communicator but merely a back-slapping post-post-adolescent.

Even the conversationalists who once made political talk shows bearable have, one by one, disappeared: On Meet the Press, the professional, balanced Garrick Utley and the amiable, genuinely curious Tim Russert have been supplanted with a series of strident self-appointed defenders of democracy: David Gregory, Chuck Todd, and now the lamentable Kristen Welker. Even Tucker Carlson is far from a natural interlocutor. To his credit, he does seem to listen to people, though, with his eyes in a confused stare and his mouth ever-so-slightly agape, his laugh is no less ill-timed and feigned-sounding than Jimmy Fallon’s.

DAVID MAMET'S LIFE IN HOLLYWOOD

These people like to talk, but they tend to talk at you. At best, they are monologists. None of them suggests someone you would wish to sit beside on a long bus or plane ride, an essential precondition for appearing on TV for upwards of an hour at a time. We could imagine shooting the breeze with David Letterman, or trading pro-football........

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