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" Well, here we are. CBS has to replace the best late night host ever by next year. So let&amp;#039;s not waste any time. Let&amp;#039;s get right to the wild guessing of who should take over David Letterman&amp;#039;s institution. We opted out of poaching from other late night shows \u2014 Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Conan, Chelsea Handler, and the de facto Scotsman Craig Ferguson are all off-limits \u2014 because it throws off the scale. Wild guesses are a lot more fun. Here is our baker&amp;#039;s dozen of the best fits. Ellen Degeneres  The obvious person to take over The Late Show is Ellen Degeneres. You could already make a case that she&amp;#039;s the funniest talk show host on television, and she&amp;#039;s just getting funnier. She&amp;#039;s already sexy during the daytime and she could get more risque around midnight. (The weird thing about the late-night guys right now is how oddly unsexual they all are. With the exception of Craig Ferguson, they barely even flirt.) She has that combination of being idiosyncratic and &amp;quot;show business-y&amp;quot; while being straight out of the American middle. You know who else had that? Johnny Carson. Plus, which talk show host is going to beat this? \u2014Stephen Marche      Neil Patrick Harris  Tell me this did not happen: How I Met Your Mother concludes to record ratings. Les Moonves wakes up Tuesday morning to read the trades and envisions a Neil Patrick Harris-less CBS, and he can&amp;#039;t handle it. Moonves calls him up and, after a few minutes on hold because NPH is turning down the role of the Riddler in Batman, he demands a sweetheart deal. The sweetheart deal is The Late Show. Moonves stews over it, thinks about the universal adoration for a non-straight white man in this country \u2014 one who can put on a show that pleases literally everybody \u2014 and caves. He then calls Dave, and Dave can&amp;#039;t even contest it. Dave is too tired to fight it anymore. Dave concedes, finally, admirably. Tell me it didn&amp;#039;t happen. Tell me. \u2014Ben Collins Louis C.K.  Of course it has to be Louis. How can it be anyone but Louis? Louis, who made it his mission to deconstruct the entire notion of late night already on his eponymous show. Louis, who, time and again, proves to us that he can be every bit as biting and real and necessary as his forebearers were. This is the same Louis whom we all can&amp;#039;t help but see as a real guy with real problems and a heart of gold flecked with specks of flint, who tackles race, gender, and modern technology issues and general PC-undermining discomfort like he&amp;#039;s eating breakfast cereal. If you can only imagine what a nightly lesson in rudimentary Buddhism might do for America, the choice is as clear as this man&amp;#039;s worldview. \u2014Eric Vilas-Boas  Jay Leno  Just kidding. The answer is Louis C.K. There is no other answer. \u2014Ben Collins Marc Maron  Late night lacks depth. This is TV, after all. You put on pretty faces, you get your punchlines in, you put together your viral Johnny Cash performance. But Marc Maron&amp;#039;s conversations on his podcast WTF contain the sort of fascinating revelations that would make even Terry Gross&amp;#039;s head spin. Maron is able to set his guests at ease so that they don&amp;#039;t think twice about telling him the story of when, say, they were locked out of their hotel room naked with their drug-addicted boyfriend (in the case of Lucinda Williams). His interviews are like therapy sessions. Watching them unravel on TV would be fascinating. \u2014Paul Schrodt Patton Oswalt  He&amp;#039;s funny. He&amp;#039;s lovable, but he also continues the trend of non-sexualized talk show hosts. He&amp;#039;s not so big that it&amp;#039;s beneath him, but not so small that people won&amp;#039;t know who he is. The kids love him \u2014 he speaks for them in some ways, not with or down to or at them \u2014 parents love him, and when he smiles, it makes you want to smile. Which is one thing Dave has in spades. \u2014James Joiner Aisha Tyler  Why? Because there aren&amp;#039;t enough strong black female comedians in primetime. This&amp;#039;d open a lot of doors. My only hope is that she&amp;#039;d continue to be left of center. She&amp;#039;s tried out several acts the last few years \u2014 from cigar chompin&amp;#039; one-of-the-guys to beauty queen and back again \u2014 but her real strengths lay in throwing her hands up in the air and saying &amp;quot;fk it!&amp;quot; and deciding to be herself. Check out her early (pre-Joel McHale) work on The Soup to see what I mean. \u2014Ned Hepburn Sarah Silverman  Her act has matured beyond shocking people. Plus, she&amp;#039;s friends with everyone \u2014 those tough first years will have guests like Jon Stewart, Dave Chappelle, and Zach Galifiankis instead of the turdy old CBS procedural stars that anyone else would have to use as filler. Plus, she&amp;#039;d be going up against her ex, Jimmy Kimmel. Drama! \u2014Anna Peele Hologram Johnny Carson  Because no one has ever been better, so why fk around? Plus, they can take the money they save from the salary and spend it on even better writers. \u2014James Joiner Amy Sedaris  She is the whole package, hiding in plain sight.  She can do cooking bits, improv, and she can have weird, deep conversations with celebrities. She&amp;#039;s also old enough to bring the level of gravity required for a Dave Letterman replacement. Bonus: She&amp;#039;s buds with Stephen Colbert. Maybe he&amp;#039;ll give her a few writers. \u2014Paul Schrodt John Mulaney  Total wild card, but he&amp;#039;s got all the vitals. He has that babyface, like Fallon and Carson. He&amp;#039;s got the writing chops, like Conan, having spent years writing at SNL. Just like his friend and writing partner Seth Meyers, he&amp;#039;s nowhere near death. Very far away from death, this guy. He also wrote one of the funniest clean standup bits of the last decade. And he came up with Stefon. What else do you want, other than a recognizable face? That&amp;#039;s all that would do him in. But it&amp;#039;s friendly-looking enough face to get away with it, isn&amp;#039;t it? \u2014Ben Collins Eddie Murphy  We&amp;#039;re not sure Eddie Murphy even wants this job. But we want him to want this job, as badly as he once wanted to be the greatest comedian alive.\u2014Paul Schrodt Paul F. Tompkins  Is America ready for a dapper late night host? Paul has been doing stand-up for for nearly 20 years and his work on Comedy Bang! Bang! shows how great of an improviser he is. He&amp;#039;s naturally charming, and he&amp;#039;s not the freshest young comedian in the bunch anymore, but that could work to his advantage. He&amp;#039;s been one of the hardest working guys in the game for years now, and certainly one of the funniest. \u2014Ned Hepburn Amy Schumer  Inside Amy Schumer is fantastic, but it&amp;#039;s her girl-on-the-street interviews that really show how well she pops with people of all backgrounds. She really has what it takes to fill Letterman&amp;#039;s affable-yet-awkward shoes. She&amp;#039;s a very real &amp;quot;for the people&amp;quot; person that thankfully isn&amp;#039;t as pandering and corporate and dopey as Jimmy Fallon \u2014 yet she&amp;#039;s still just as likable. And that&amp;#039;s what matters. Amy shares the same comedic genes as Letterman: an outsider you&amp;#039;d be more than willing to share a few beers with. \u2014Ned Hepburn "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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