Another one bites the dust.
That’s it and that’s all for the late-night host Stephen Colbert, whose intolerance, intransigence and nightly screeds against Trump have surely led CBS to kill his entire show.
R.I.P. The Late Show, dead at 33 — the same age as Christ, which I mention because Colbert, a vocal Catholic, is busy turning himself into a martyr.
Yes: The insufferable Stephen Colbert has been crucified by his network, he’ll have us believe, for speaking out against one Donald J. Trump.
The reflexive celebrity testimonials from the likes of Ben Stiller, Katie Couric and Adam Scott immediately poured in. And — surprise, surprise — they’re not generating the intended response.
Take a look at Jason Alexander, the Seinfeld star who posted on Instagram, in part: ‘Stephen… you will not be silenced or dismissed.’
Well, Jason, he just was — and unceremoniously at that.
Responses to that post make it clear how little people agree.
R.I.P. The Late Show , dead at 33 – the same age as Christ, which I mention because Stephen Colbert, a vocal Catholic, is busy turning himself into a martyr
Yes: the insufferable Stephen Colbert has been crucified by his network, he’ll have us believe, for speaking out against one Donald J. Trump
One: ‘We need more humor and less virtue signaling.’
Another: ‘To make the whole show every day political? That’s why they dropped him… S**t gets old no matter what side you sit on.’
And my favorite, which speaks to millions of Americans: ‘He chose to use his platform as his own personal sermon. After I’ve worked 12 hours, then cooked dinner and got my kids ready [for] bed, I don’t want to be lectured to or demeaned if my politics differ. It’s a special kind of arrogance to think that you, as a comedian, can stop doing your job and instead use your show as a pulpit.’
In an official statement, CBS says it was ‘purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night’ and nothing to do with the show’s ‘content’.
But while every late-night show except Greg Gutfeld’s on Fox limps along on life support, Colbert was the worst host of them all: strident, hectoring, a total scold and schoolmarm monomaniacally animated by hatred of Trump — which translates into hatred of more than half the country.
Rather than accept that CBS has made a prudent business decision — Colbert’s show cost $100 million to produce and lost $40 million annually — Hollywood insists Colbert is the sacrificial lamb in the pending merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance (owned by the son of billionaire Trump loyalist Larry Ellison).
A lot of heavy weather has also been made of the recent $16 million Paramount payment to settle Trump’s lawsuit against the network, which just this week Colbert slammed as a ‘big, fat bribe.’
Truly, Stephen Colbert poses no threat to Trump.
He speaks in an echo chamber. He’s just an unfunny guy who takes himself way too seriously, whose own mission creep turned his show into unwatchable punditry, and who, rather than engage in witty banter, is always out to prove he’s the smartest guy in the room.
Take his 2017 interview with Ricky Gervais — a far finer mind — in which a smug Colbert initiated a debate about religion and tried to discredit Gervais’s well-known atheism.
Late-night banter indeed.
Gervais: ‘You believe in one God, I assume.’
Colbert: ‘Uh, in three persons, but yeah.’
Gervais: ‘So there are about 3,000 [gods through human history] to choose from… so basically, you deny one less god than I do.’
That clip has over 15 million views on YouTube, which should have told Colbert something — namely, to tone down the smug self-regard and use his platform for its intended purpose: laughter.
But no. Colbert is way too important for that. In a June 2024 profile with Entertainment Weekly, Colbert pulled out a photo not of late-night legends Johnny Carson or David Letterman but famed news anchor Walter Cronkite.
‘This is my reminder,’ Colbert intoned, ‘that Walter Cronkite started off as a morning anchor who had a puppet lion, so let’s not hear about the dignity of CBS News. F**k you.’
Colbert was the worst host of them all: strident, hectoring, a total scold. Take his 2017 interview with Ricky Gervais, in which a smug Colbert initiated a debate about religion and tried to discredit Gervais’s well-known atheism
Truly, Stephen Colbert poses no threat to Trump. He speaks in an echo chamber. He’s just an unfunny guy who takes himself way too seriously, whose own mission creep turned his show into unwatchable punditry
The arrogance. The hubris. Colbert was paid a reported $15 million a year, yet insulted his bosses in print and on his show — and thought he was too important to face consequences!
Instead, of course, he and his cohort blame Trump — who, frankly, has bigger problems to deal with than this late-night hack.
‘Everyone knows what happened,’ a Colbert show source told the Daily Mail. ‘He came out against Trump and now he’s gone.’
Or maybe he just bleeds $40 million annually and can’t book any guests bigger than Rep. Adam Schiff, who told President Trump to ‘piss off’ on Thursday night’s show.
It’s similarly grim for the apolitical Jimmy Fallon, cut down from five to four nights a week at NBC; Seth Meyers, who had to fire his band after budget cuts; and Jimmy Kimmel, whose viewing figures lag some 600,000 behind Colbert.
‘F**k CBS,’ said Kimmel this week.
How brave. How impactful. Listen, Kimmel — your days are numbered, too.
Ultra-liberal Jon Stewart, who returned to his desk at The Daily Show after all manner of other projects failed to launch, on whether his own show will last much longer: ‘I honestly don’t know. They may sell the whole f**king place for parts.’
These guys just refuse to get the memo. They still cling to the sinking ship of liberal legacy media and linear TV, which viewers are rejecting in droves.
Even Gutfeld!, which dominates with three million nightly viewers, is a shadow of what late-night TV was before YouTube and digital media.
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which ran from 1962 to 1992, typically pulled in over 15 million viewers.
Think about it: Carson’s show ran through the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, Watergate, Roe v. Wade, the Cold War, the AIDS epidemic, and the fall of the Berlin Wall — to name just a few political and historical earthquakes.
And viewers never, ever knew Carson’s politics.
‘That’s not what I’m there for,’ Carson said. ‘Why do they think that just because you have a Tonight Show that you must deal in serious issues? It’s a danger — it’s a real danger. Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling that what you say has great import, and you know, strangely enough, you could use that show as a forum, you could sway people. And I don’t think you should as an entertainer.’
Carson was called ‘The King of Late Night’ for a reason. And descendants like Stephen Colbert, with that ‘self-important feeling,’ now preside over the end of an empire.
