Last week – just a few days after Stephen Colbert called out his parent company for paying Donald Trump millions of dollars – CBS canceled the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
Maybe now people will finally stop saying Trump is good for comedy.
In this latest Trump administration, I often joke that I’m just not cut out for being this furious all the time. I’m a comedy writer. I’m built for naming dogs Doctor Reginald Pancakes and writing sentences like “Every woman’s deodorant is called Delicate Whisper and every man’s deodorant is called Beef Shazam!” I get that there’s nothing more annoying than a comedian getting all serious, and yet here we are.
So first, let’s address the obvious: was the cancellation for political reasons or, as the network claims, for “purely financial” reasons. My answer? Yes. The problem is we keep treating those like they’re separate things.
CBS isn’t ending the show for 10 months. They could have made the announcement whenever they wanted. But they chose to tell Stephen Colbert, host of the highest-rated network late night showjust 48 hours after he called Paramount’s payment to Trump a “big fat bribe”. They chose to cancel the Peabody award-winning show in the midst of an attempt to sell Paramount to a company called Skydance, a merger that has to be approved by the Trump administration. They chose to tell Colbert they were canceling his show, one day after the CEO of Skydance met with the FCC and discussed “CBS’s editorial decision-making”.
Basically, if the decision wasn’t political, then Paramount sure is happy to let it look political, and at that point there’s no meaningful difference. Whether the network canceled the Late Show to appease Trump or not, they did it knowing he’d think so.
CBS wants it both ways. They want the viewers to believe they’re an unbiased network and they want Trump to think they’ll do anything he wants.
So that’s what I think as a human being who lives in this world right now. But, as a comedy writer who wrote for late night TV for almost a decade? Well, I can’t stop thinking about the jokes. This cancellation is really sad to me because I believe in the power of jokes.
True story: once a guy was mugging me and he started punching me in the face. I told a joke and he STOPPED PUNCHING ME. That is the power of jokes. (No, I will not tell you the joke. Because I’d say it and then you’d be all “C’mon, it’s not that funny” and then I’d have to be all: “No, you had to be there. It’s not as funny when you aren’t punching me in the face.”)
The thing about jokes is that they require a shared base of knowledge. A shared reality. If I tell a joke about a commercial and you’ve never seen that commercial, the joke isn’t going to go over very well. Losing late night shows is one more step toward losing a shared reality, and that to me is terrifying.
There is a moment every New Yorker knows. It happens when you’re on the subway and someone does something particularly insane: an 83-year-old white lady raps, or a man in a three-piece suit publicly clips his toenails. And then you catch the eye of someone across the train – they raise their eyebrows and you raise your eyebrows back. And then you feel a little better. Because someone else saw what you saw and they can confirm that it’s something.
Late night hosts like Stephen Colbert do that on a larger scale. They’re our way of saying: “Hey, this is crazy, right? RIGHT?” In this world of algorithmic bubbles and blatant lies and deepfakes, late night television is a place you can gather at night and say: “Yes, this happened and it is fucking weird.”
Here’s another thing I like about jokes: the basis of jokes is truth. I’ve written books, speeches, game shows and news articles and I’ve never been fact-checked as hard as I was when writing late night television. Jokes just don’t work if they’re not based on something true.
And for our leaders? The ability to take a joke matters. If our corporate overlords and representatives in government can’t handle being joked about on late night TV, we don’t need new shows. We need new leaders. In this current system – with a Congress and a supreme court who want nothing more than to cater to Trump’s every whim – we don’t have a lot of options to hold our leaders accountable. In a free society, joking about our leaders isn’t just helpful or fun, it’s vital.
For me, this isn’t just about Colbert. (I met him once. In 2014, the day Last Week Tonight with John Oliver was set to tape our first show, Colbert came to our office and went from room to room to congratulate each member of the staff and to wish us luck. It was a kind gesture that I’ll long remember.)
It’s not just about his staff – a couple hundred people who in my experience are thoughtful, hilarious, ridiculously competent people at the top of their game.
It’s not even just about the humiliating weakness the television networks continue to display as the president sues them into silence.
It’s about the jokes. We need the jokes. Because this country could really use a break from getting punched in the face.
