More than $40 million.
That’s the pricy sum the Stephen Colbert–hosted Late Show was losing every year for CBS, according to news reports.
One would think that, this being the case, Colbert and his bosses would have long ago taken a serious look at what wasn’t working and changed course. Simply put: Fix the problem!
The problem, of course, was something Colbert was unwilling to fix.
That problem? His obsession with President Donald Trump.
One of the reasons for the continual success for the man known back in the day as “The King of Late Night” — that would be NBC’s Johnny Carson — was that he made sure that when he or his guests went after the president of the moment, it was always done for laughs.
Take a look here from this clip now on You Tube. Carson’s guest of the moment was the comedian/impressionist Rich Little — and, as you can see, Little’s Nixon routine was not some serious lecture on Nixon’s politics and issues of the day. To the contrary, Little did his best Nixon imitation, exaggerating Nixon’s mannerisms to the max and leaving both his audience and Carson in stitches.
Alas, Colbert is utterly unwilling or unable to go down the road of making humor out of a president. What Colbert is about is thinly veiled humor that is so obviously a stern, humorless lesson promoting far-left politics. And, in doing so, he usually includes a stern lecture about Trump. Or addresses the president directly, as just in the last few days when Colbert looked into the camera and told Trump…
Hmmm. This being a family publication, I will not print what he said. A link to a Fox News headline will suffice to get the point across of the kind of anti-Trump behavior Colbert thinks acceptable.
Bear in mind that this is late-night TV. Americans are either getting ready to head to bed or already tucked in, slowly starting to doze off to dreamland. The last thing they want after a long day of work and kids is some humorless alleged comedian acting like a jack lecturing them on politics.
Again, contrast Colbert’s behavior on Trump with that clip of Rich Little and Johnny Carson in the Nixon era — a time when the country was roiled by the decidedly serious issues of the Vietnam War and later Watergate — and the difference is all too obvious.
In the Watergate days, a huge issue was the discovery that Nixon had been secretly tape-recording himself — and this fact had suddenly come out in the Senate Watergate hearings. It was a scandal’s scandal, as serious as it could be. It eventually led to the discovery of a tape in which Nixon was heard decidedly planning/leading the Watergate coverup. And then came his resignation from the presidency.
Yet in the midst of that discovery, there was Rich Little-as-Nixon picking up on the name of the then-hit movie Planet of the Apes and renaming it in his skit as Nixon talking about making a movie called “Planet of the Tapes.” As seen, the audience and Carson howled.
To say the least, Colbert is so crazed about seriously lecturing his audience on his far left, anti-Trump politics that, as the CBS finances show, his viewers and audience of paid advertisers have slowly been melting away.
Is there a lesson there, if too late, for Colbert? Yes. But more to the point, the lesson is there for any wannabe late-night host.
Late-night audiences are not climbing into bed after a hard day of work to be lectured on the politics of the moment. They want to chill. To laugh.
Johnny Carson got it. Which is one of the reasons he was, in fact, seen across the land as the King of Late Night.
Something Stephen Colbert will never be.
And it’s not hard to figure out why, either.
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