When CBS announced it would cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Donald Trump “truthed” as follows: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings.” Summoning a gilt cartoon frame called the “eloquence cam,” Colbert replied: “Go f**k yourself.”

His fellow talk show host, Jon Stewart, addressed CBS directly with the help of a backup gospel choir: “Go fk yourself! (Go fk yourself!) Go f**k yourself!” and so on.

One begins to detect a theme. Powerful as it is to watch two men in their 60s repeatedly shriek a single obscenity at an ever-thinning crowd, maybe Trump had a point? 

Colbert and his supporters are speculating that Paramount, CBS’s parent company, killed the show in hopes of currying favor with Trump after paying him $16 million to settle his lawsuit against 60 Minutes over an edited campaign interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount needs FCC approval for its pending bailout merger with the newer media company Skydance; Colbert did a monologue on the subject this month, which was notable for including one or two amusing lines about his then-new mustache. If Paramount simply feared reprisal for this daring anti-Trump satire, though, surely they would just hire a more MAGA-friendly host to scream “Go f**k yourself!” at Elizabeth Warren.

Instead they’re canceling the Late Show franchise altogether, which suggests the appeal of the whole routine may be wearing somewhat thin. Whatever other strategic discussions occurred internally at Paramount, Colbert’s ratings were probably reason enough to pull the plug. Fans keep insisting that he was number one in his time slot, but that’s a little like saying Moe was the smartest Stooge. The show was hemorrhaging money, and Reuters reports that late-night comedy is getting scaled back or dropped across the board. The format simply isn’t competitive anymore.

Your goofy uncle probably always made better mustache jokes than Colbert, but now he can do it into an iPhone camera and go viral. Late night is losing out to Instagram Reels—and it’s not particularly close. A Netflix video simply entitled “14 minutes of Nate Bargatze” is doing better numbers on YouTube than most of Colbert’s monologues. There are more laughs in five randomly selected minutes of Shane Gillis’s show Tires than in the entirety of most late-night episodes.

Part of the problem is that guys like Colbert and Stewart crave approval from the tight-lipped hall monitors who pitch a fit if you make fun of things like Black Lives Matter, objectively the most hilarious scam in American life to date. Court eunuchs like Colbert would commit ritual suicide before offending their naked emperors, so all they’re left with is vaudevillian chorus lines of dancing COVID vaccines (a real thing that actually happened).

Then there’s the Trump of it all. It has always been notable that Colbert’s monologues instantly get less funny when the subject of the president pops up. On the topic of mustaches we’re in passable dad joke territory. On the topic of Trump, the man starts frothing at the mouth. I am reminded of the Wojak meme in which a cartoon character sweats and sobs with impotent rage behind a flimsy mask of smirking nonchalance. Colbert looks a little like that when he talks about Trump.

Maybe that’s because Trump makes people laugh. A defining feature of his inimitable rhetoric is his total disregard for the labyrinth of tripwires and prohibitions that censorious tastemakers lay across the paths of comics like Colbert. It must be infuriating, after tap dancing your way through a minefield of seminar-room speech codes, to watch your most hated political enemy stomping on every last mine and blowing up on TikTok. But then show business, like politics, is a numbers game. And the people have spoken.