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| Colbert and Trump in happier times (2015) |
Stephen Colbert can stamp his feet all he wants about CBS ending his late-night show. He can scream and tantrum to his heart's content. But in the end the loss of The Late Show is squarely on him. And the rest of the "talent" on late at night would do well to learn from his example.
Here's the secret to success at television after the eleven o'clock news. Most people do not want the last thing that they allow into their minds before going to bed be unrelenting bitterness. Late-night hosts like Johnny Carson, and Jay Leno after him, knew that people at that hour wanted one last shot of laughter to end their day on. And those hosts provided that. Viewers tuned in, got a good chuckle, and wound up going to sleep feeling that however rotten the day had been, it ended on a somewhat happy note after all. It's a formula that kept television audiences tuned in for decades to those hosts of times past.
Colbert and the rest of his kind never understood that or ever really cared to. That kind of "comedy" isn't their forté. They believe that "humor" is vile and mean-spirited and they went to great lengths to proclaim that they represented "new comedy".
But in the end, their "comedy" for the past decade had only one setting: "Trump Bad And Republicans Evil"(tm). People got tired of that. Bitterness can only go so far in a business that is allegedly about entertaining people instead of preaching down to them. If nothing else, Colbert was doing his best to insult half of his potential audience... and that's never a good practice, either.
No, it wasn't politics that led CBS to can The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. It was solid numbers that Colbert and his staff weren't justifying having a presence with. I'm seeing that it cost the network $40 million a year to keep the show running. What kind of an audience does that kind of money supposed to achieve? Carson had higher numbers than that during his long tenure on The Tonight Show, with far less a budget.
It wasn't politics. It certainly wasn't President Donald Trump waving a cloaked sleeve like he's a Dark Lord of the Sith telling his minions to "do it!" to anyone who merits his wrath. It was nothing but raw hatred and anger, perpetuated long past their expiration dates. It's kind of ironic: Stephen Colbert liked cancel culture. Until cancel culture came to cancel him.
Maybe the pendulum will begin to swing the other way now. I've believed for awhile that the ground is fertile for a late-night host in the tradition of Carson and Leno. Hosts who devoted at most three jokes a night about the president. They were men who understood laughter and people's need for it. Something that Colbert and his sort never did and probably never will.
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