Last week, Stephen Colbert gave conservatives our first laugh in 10 years of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, when he announced the cancellation of his show. Colbert had been sniping at us for a decade — and at Donald Trump in particular — minus the most effective weapon, comedy. He exchanged it for repellant shrillness. In so doing, he threw away the legacy given him by his immediate predecessor, David Letterman, and the legend before him, Johnny Carson.
The time of Johnny Carson drawing 17-million viewers a night is long past.
Carson may have been a liberal, but it didn’t matter during his 30-year reign as the king of late-night talk. He mocked people on both ideological sides and made them all laugh. When Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden got exposed for plagiarism, for instance, Carson let him have it in a classic opening monologue:
“One of the Democratic candidates is Senator Joseph Biden. Have you seen the problems he’s been having? He went around and made a speech. And apparently, he quoted — I think it was a British politician — took his speech and paraphrased it as his own. And then the press got on him … And Biden said not to worry, he reassured his staff, he said, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’”
His audience greeted the joke not with the “Woooos” or clapter now commonplace but genuine laughter. And liberals joined in. Because it was funny. And because Americans in 1987 were better educated than those of this generation — mind-numbed by public-school indoctrination or vacuous media. So they instantly got the reference to FDR’s first inaugural address regarding the Great Depression that would confound too many people today.
That Carson’s gag also made a potential Democratic president look like a boob (talk about forewarning) was par for the course back then. Progressives used to have a sense of humor. But that ended with the rise of censorship under the Obama Administration, when every gag became a trigger — even a rodeo clown wearing an Obama mask.
Almost overnight, Hollywood turned into Hollywoke, and comedy disappeared. From the big screen, where Bush-era hits like Wedding Crashers (too sexist), Tropic Thunder (too racially-culturally insensitive), and the entire female-driven romcom genre — Notting Hill, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Hitch, 27 Dresses (women don’t need men to be fulfilled, dammit) ceased to be made. From the small screen, especially late night, with Colbert and his clones. Even from the tiny phone screen, when Cancel Culture ruled.
It seems almost a bad dream that only three years ago, satire could prompt total disappearance from social media with no recourse. Twitter banned the Babylon Bee for naming Biden’s “transgender” Assistant Secretary for Health — the ridiculous Rachel (Richard) Levine — its Man of the Year. This normalized attack on free speech convinced Elon Musk to buy Twitter and save the precious right. Yet Democrats like Hillary Clinton still call for media censorship. Damn it! Without moderation, “we lose total control,” she said in a recent interview.
For the Democrats, the Colbert cancellation is just one more loss inflicted on them by Donald Trump in his first six months in office. The proof is their hysterical — in both senses of the word — reactions. “Stephen Colbert is the best in the business,” tweeted former VP nominee and Dem macho man Tim Walz. “He always told truth to power and pulled no punches.” Best what, one might ask — mope, hack, scold? Certainly not comedian. And as for always telling the truth, his cringeworthy vaccine dance number during the COVID scare should dispel that idea.
Elizabeth Warren posted, “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.” The answer is yes. CBS cited “financial reasons” for spiking the program. But two things can be true. It was Colbert’s political idiocy and fanaticism that caused the drain of $40 million per year on a budget of over $100 million. If Colbert’s leftwing screeching translated into profit, the show would go on. For unlike the host, sponsors could read the room in a bustling new Trump Administration, and put their money elsewhere.
All Colbert had to do was be funny and maybe ridicule his side sometime in the last four years. You had a walking zombie President, a First Lady Macbeth, a coke-snorting son, a ridiculously woke goon squad, and a yapping media Greek chorus, not one of them spoofed by Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, or Seth Meyers. Kimmel actually shed a tear when announcing Trump’s reelection on his show.
Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld mocked them all, to include Joe Biden poop jokes. The result is Gutfeld’s 3.2-million nightly viewers tops Colbert’s 2.4 million, Kimmel’s 1.7 million, Fallon’s 1.2 million, and Meyer’s sub-million at a fraction of their production cost. Gutfeld hit close to five million viewers one night last September, when his guest was Donald Trump. He has one more big advantage over his four rivals. He’s funny.
But it may be musical graves. The late-night market is unsustainable given the diversity in schedulable entertainment. The time of Johnny Carson drawing 17-million viewers a night is long past. CBS announced it will not replace Colbert with another chat program. Maybe they could try a comedy show.
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