During the first Trump administration US late night talk show hosts grew increasingly irritated with people who said things like, “You don’t really have to do anything right? The jokes must just write themselves.” In the fog of depression that remained once the disbelief at Trump’s election had lifted, it was often to clips of US late night comedians’ monologues that many turned for comic relief and an explanation of the madness that was enveloping US society and politics.
Hosts such as Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, John Oliver and Jimmy Kimmel threw objectivity out the window as they firmly planted their flags in the sand as disbelievers and disparagers of Trump and the Maga movement, and the world seemed a better place because of them. When Joe Biden took back the presidency for the Democrats in 2020, late night and its audience breathed a loud sigh of relief, even as Trump and his supporters remained in the wings loudly proclaiming the return of their orange messiah in the next election cycle.
Though it was easy to brush off Trump and his supporters as low-hanging fruit for mockery, emboldening many hosts to make their feelings about the possibility of a Trump return resoundingly clear, they may have laughed off too blithely his oft-repeated promise that were he to return for a second term, the gloves would come off.
The older generation of late night hosts weren’t averse to discussing politics, but the genre had traditionally focused on creating a big tent that attempted to appeal to American audiences of all political and religious stripes. The first Trump presidency irrevocably changed that as the increasingly populated and competitive late night arena became a decidedly political and anti-Trump space. With the return of John Stewart to The Daily Show in the lead-up to the second Trump era and the increasingly pointed attacks of hosts such as Colbert, Kimmel and Meyers, late night moved from being a target of Trump’s verbal indignation to one that he might deal with using his political sway and famously litigious tendencies.
With the recent bowing of Paramount to Trump in the 60 Minutes lawsuit demonstrating the extent to which mega media corporations are willing to sacrifice their ethics to the profits of shareholders, many wondered whether Colbert, the host of CBS’s The Late Show, would say anything against his parent corporation.
On his return from summer holidays a few weeks ago, Colbert did not disappoint his liberal audience, decrying Paramount’s multimillion-dollar settlement of its lawsuit with Trump as a cop-out and bribe, much to the excitement of his cheering studio audience. Days later Colbert sat at his iconic desk in the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York and told his audience that not only would his decade-long tenure as host of the show be ending but that Paramount had pulled the plug on the show, citing its $40m losses and insisting that the decision was “purely for financial reasons”.
Colbert will continue as host until the scheduled end of this season in May next year. He may have been forced to accept the decision, but he promised his audience and fans that “the gloves are off” as far as Trump was concerned.
While Trump welcomed Colbert’s axing the president has denied exerting any influence on Paramount to end the show. If he thought that Colbert’s exit would serve as a warning for other late night hosts and comedians, he was sorely mistaken.
Instead Colbert’s firing has rallied the entire community of late night hosts, their writers and other satirical comedy show creators to stand behind him and go into full Trump attack mode. Even the usually tame Jimmy Fallon has taken more targeted aim at Trump and Paramount. In perhaps its most successfully barbed and controversial recent episode, the long-running, satirical, animated comedy South Park made mention of Colbert and Paramount’s cowardice in its recent episode that included scenes of Trump having sex with Satan and talking to his own penis. That’s despite South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker recently having signed a five-year $1.5bn deal with Paramount to bring the show to the Paramount Plus streaming network worldwide.
Most other hosts and media observers have not bought Paramount’s explanation, with many pointing out that the traditional metric for success of such shows has not been financial but based on ratings, and Colbert’s show remained the highest rated of the bunch, even in the streaming era.
Spin doctors and the Trump administration would have you believe that the final approval of the Paramount-Skydance merger just weeks after Colbert’s firing and the company’s settlement of the 60 Minutes lawsuit is purely coincidental.
Fans may be grateful that Colbert’s firing means he no longer has any reason to censor himself regarding Paramount and Trump, but that will be a pyrrhic victory if the long-term effect is the removal of satirists from the space we need them to occupy if we’re to retain any kind of sanity in this increasingly exasperating world.
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