Any discussion of Stephen Colbert destroying the “Late Night” institution that David Letterman started decades ago can’t happen without acknowledging a few facts. First, Colbert is not funny. Second, CBS kept the show on life support for longer than it would have any other show. Third, the leftist media knows these things. And finally, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy (unless it happens to Jimmy Kimmel).
It was a great week to be a conservative, with the funding of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service being zeroed out after having been promised that very thing by various Republicans for my entire life.
The same day the Senate passed the rescission package killing a liberal sacred cow (it’s not actually dead, they can operate quite nicely on the money they get from donors, corporations and rich liberals, and they can always sell more tote bags or learn to code to make up the difference), news came down that CBS was canceling "Late Night with Stephen Colbert." While most people didn’t know it was still on – it had lost a third of its viewers in the last couple of years and was already a ratings shell compared to Carson, Letterman, and Leno – when they heard about the cancellation, they…didn’t care.
But liberals did. The leftist progressive group-thinkers who demand absolute conformity of thought and obedience to the Democrat Party reacted like they’d lost a parent. Hell, they probably had a falling out with their parents long ago, likely after referring to them as their “birthing people” and mom and dad getting sick of it, that they were more upset over losing Colbert. You don’t see “think” pieces in major publications wondering, “Is it time to stop snubbing your right-wing comedians?” the way they wondered about “right-wing family.”
No, don’t stop snubbing us in any area of life. We’re happier without you because conditional friendship isn’t true friendship, and you’re not doing us any favors by bringing your fraudulent “friendship” into our lives. If you grow the hell up, maybe, but that is unlikely, as a good person wouldn’t have in them what you people did in the first place.
So, marinate in your misery over Colbert being canceled. We love it. Because, like so many other leftists who have destroyed themselves, all he had to do was his job, and he would have been fine. All he had to do was make people laugh regularly, make fun of everyone, and attract an audience, but he couldn’t do it.
Colbert could have been as left-wing as he is and still have been successful if he had just been funny. But he took a genre – comedy – that is and always has been about a “set up and punchline” and turned it into a grievance and applause line. That’s what politicians do, not comedians.
The audience didn’t laugh at what Stephen Colbert said; they agreed with it. They clapped in agreement more often than they laughed uncontrollably. That’s not comedy, it’s what you get at a political convention.
Reports show that the show is losing $40 million a year, and Colbert was making between $15 and $20 million. That means even if he did it for free, and the salary for the host is always the biggest expense, they still would have been hemorrhaging money. The only way out of that hole would have been to attract a larger audience.
But Stephen Colbert refused to set aside his rabid and radical politics to try to draw in more people. He had a steady string of guests that voters and audiences rejected repeatedly – Bernie Sanders was on almost two dozen times, Stacey Abrams was on more times than she lost elections, everyone on CNN and MSNBC was welcomed as though they had an audience, and that audience was desperate to see more of them. Unpopular guests on an unpopular show do not magically make ratings gold.
As you hear sad tales of the hundreds (I’d imagine) of people who work on the show who will lose their good jobs in an attempt to shame CBS, remember it was Stephen Colbert who refused to do a show that a large number of people wanted to watch. The person who could have saved the show was the guy with his name on it, but he would not change because he, like so many on the left, is “politics uber alles.”
Progressives are progressives first; anything else they are a distant second, even if it means destroying themselves.
As idiots like Brian Stelter and Chris Hayes wonder aloud things like “Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions (sic),” it’s important to remember were it not for his politics, Colbert would have been fired long ago. In fact, he would not have been hired in the first place.
Colbert will be missed…by someone…probably. They didn’t watch him, but they’ll profess an important loss without him. Then they’ll go back to not watching Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and all the other boring, unfunny sameness that is the progressive equivalent of televangelism and keep wondering why they aren’t winning elections. They couldn’t get any more clueless if they were dared to.
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, DC, and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.