Colbert’s Demise: When Politics Supersedes Comedy In Late Night

Many of us fondly remember the days when late-night talk show hosts like Johnny Carson and Jay Leno came into our living rooms every night with one goal in mind: to entertain as many people as possible through laughter.

But with the rise of Donald Trump, late-night comedy shows morphed into nightly attacks on the man over 77 million Americans sent to the White House. Every evening for years now, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel subjected their audiences to non-stop Trump bashing.

It’s vicious, relentless, and, worst of all, not funny.

These “comics” came to view their platforms not as vehicles to entertain a broad spectrum of the American public, but rather a podium from which to blast out their ultra-left politics and Stage 4 Trump Derangement, while cloaking themselves in obnoxiously self-righteous sanctimony along the way.

As anyone who suffered through their childishly acrimonious monologues could attest, if you hated Trump in particular, or anyone to the right of Che Guevara in general, you found comfort in the acid bath of antipathy that came spewing from your screen courtesy of hosts who we were told were comics.

But things might be changing.

Last week, Colbert announced that CBS had cancelled his show, and that they would not replace him. One imagines that Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers — none of whom are bringing in audiences — will be canned imminently.

Many have met the demise of Colbert — a man whose idea of comedy was dancing hypodermic needles to push a government narrative in a manner that would make Pravda blush — marks the end of late-night talk shows as a whole. But are they really dead? Or is it just the DNC propaganda machine version of these shows bound for extinction?

As I wrote a while back while lamenting the death of the genuine late-night comedy of Carson — whose last show in May 1992 was watched by an astounding 50 million Americans — several times over the years I did make a sincere effort to watch Colbert or Kimmel.

They were funny on The Late Show and The Man Show respectively. And I’m willing to be entertained by a truly funny Trump joke. But the level of sheer vitriol and ugliness masquerading as humor on these shows made them impossible to watch. So did the monotony: late night hosts just kept coming at the guy, one Trump assault after another after another. On Colbert one night I literally counted five Trump “jokes” in a row in the opening monologue before I finally had to turn him off. Not because it offended my politics, or my feelings. But rather because it failed to make me laugh. Why else would anyone tune in?

For example, a recent Colbert monologue about Trump sending in the National Guard to quell anti-ICE street violence in California featured the following:

“What’s going on in LA reminds us that it is crucial to speak out against Trump’s fascist impulses, his rampant corruption, and his egregious violations of our norms and our laws…The last time a president bypassed a governor to send in the National Guard was 1965 when LBJ used troops to protect civil rights demonstrators in Alabama. So, we’ve come full circle. Troops were used to protect protesters by Lyndon B. Johnson. Now they’re being used to harass protesters by Donald B. D***.”

Crickets. Cough. Scraping chair leg.

Who needs to tune in to a DNC stump speech after a long day at work? What normal American wants to be subjected to an obsequious Colbert slobbering over guest Adam Schiff while the serial liar looks at the camera and says in his toughest beta male milquetoast persona: “Donald, piss off”? Hmmm. Maybe I’ll just read a few pages of a book before I turn in.

Hang on to your seat, because the laughs just kept on coming.

Consider such comedy gold as his declaring that the Iran strike didn’t take out all their centrifuges, whether true or not. Colbert said it was “less Operation Midnight Hammer and more Operation M.C. Hammer.” Huh? That barely makes sense, let alone makes people laugh. This is the best his team of 24 writers could come up with?

Despite the predictable howls from the usual suspects — for whom late-night hosts are the pharmacies for their daily dose of TDS — Colbert was not fired because he criticized Trump. It was really just a matter of dollars and cents.

Colbert attracts 2.2 million viewers on average; Kimmel 1.7 million; Fallon, just 1.19 million. Colbert and Kimmel average just over 200,000 in the key demographic of viewers 25-54.

Tellingly, these represent just 60% of numbers put up by the Fox Network’s late-night competitor The Greg Gutfeld Show.

And then there’s production budgets, really the heart of the matter. Colbert’s show costs more than $100 million a year to produce, including Colbert’s $15 million salary. The problem for Colbert is that his show only brings in roughly $60 million in annual ad revenue.

Megyn Kelly, a former Fox TV host herself, estimates that Gutfeld’s budget for his successful forum is around $10 million. This doesn’t include his salary; the last numbers I saw shows Fox pays their unsung late-night star $7 million annually.

So, even if the total cost of the Greg Gutfeld Show is around $20 million, that’s still a fraction of the cost of legacy media’s failing late-night offerings. Which means there is still a way to make the late night format profitable.

Like its rivals, The Greg Gutfeld Show is certainly political in nature. Gutfeld isn’t Carson, and conservatives will likely feel more at home with Gutfeld and his rotating panel of conservative hosts. But unlike the other shows, Gutfeld is also entertaining, light-hearted, self-effacing, and, most importantly, funny.

In a way, Colbert’s demise is an apt metaphor for the sinking fortunes of the Democrat Party itself. You cannot alienate so many in a market without someone else seeing the opportunity your disregard presents while you steadily lose viewers, and influence. Whether one loves or hates Fox, they have a winning late-night formula that the mainstream media has abandoned by prioritizing divisive politics over entertainment.

Mike Wallace once asked Johnny Carson why he never got into serious subjects. Carson’s response is worth remembering:

“That’s not what I’m there for. Can’t they see that? Why do they think that just because you have a Tonight Show that you must deal in serious issues? That’s a danger. That’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.”

The legacy media should take Johnny’s advice. If they choose to go down the self-destructive path forged by Colbert and his ilk, then good riddance.

Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books. Follow him on X/Twitter.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.