The Late ‘Late’ Show

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“How dare you, sir?” he said sarcastically during Monday’s monologue, addressing Trump’s Truth Social post. “Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism? Go f— yourself.” He went on to warn the president that “the gloves are off.” Rival hosts like Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon turned up during the hour to show “solidarity” with him, which is hard to understand as a business matter but easy to understand as a political act. Jon Stewart used his own air time on Monday’s Daily Show to accuse CBS of firing Colbert to appease Trump, a theory that’s more plausible than it should be in a democratic country.

It was all very combative, very … clapter.

Stewart is an interesting comparison for Colbert, and not just because both broke big in political comedy on The Daily Show. It was Stewart’s commentary about George W. Bush and the Iraq War that became a sensation during Bush’s second term. His success on Comedy Central normalized the “clapter” model that’s defined mainstream left-wing political humor ever since, but it also made him culturally relevant in a way that none of his imitators, including Colbert, have approached.

Why is that? Why did Stewart circa 2007 seem like someone for the right to reckon with while Colbert circa 2025 is someone to mock and ignore?

Media evolution.

A lot of it, of course, is related to market saturation.

After almost 20 years of John Olivers and Samantha Bees dining out on right-wing foibles Stewart-style, the model has grown stale. The Daily Show stood more or less alone in its day, but Colbert is lost in a crowd. There’s even a Republican version of late-night “clapter” now that pulls bigger ratings than The Late Show does. The novelty is gone.

Colbert is also a prisoner of his format in a way that Stewart was not. The Daily Show of 2007 played like a subversive newscast, with Stewart as a gonzo anchor in the mold of Howard Beale. The show was less a matter of jokes peppered with political commentary than political commentary peppered with jokes. It thrived when the Iraq War went sideways because viewers believed they were hearing truths from Stewart that mainstream news outlets, which had been too credulous about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, wouldn’t tell.

The Late Show, by contrast, isn’t a newscast; it’s a variety hour. Colbert could have tried to reinvent it as a news satire like The Colbert Report, I suppose, but he lacked either the nerve or the creative freedom to do so. The audience expected something in the vein of Jay Leno or David Letterman, and he met those expectations—sort of, making the show tendentious enough to alienate right-wingers but not so tendentious as to galvanize left-wingers the way Stewart did. He had to stick to jokes peppered with commentary because the format wouldn’t support commentary peppered with jokes.

Stewart’s greatest advantage over Colbert, though, was the one identified by Jonah Goldberg. The Daily Show of the Iraq era competed in a media environment before streaming, podcasts, and social media had made derision of one’s political opponents as accessible as pornography. If you’re in the mood for that in 2025, you’re no longer stuck waiting until late night to get your fix. Satisfaction is a click away.

And as with porn, the softer stuff might start to seem unstimulating once you’ve gotten used to harder material. How exciting can Colbert’s safe-for-network-TV one-liners about Trump feel to a progressive who listens religiously to “dirtbag left” content?

For a few years in the late aughts, Stewart’s show was the only place on television that an opponent of the war could see his or her arguments incisively articulated on a nightly basis. That made it a formidable weapon in America’s endless information war. Fast-forward 18 years and Colbert’s program wouldn’t rank among the top 100 most influential platforms pressing the case against Trump. It’s a weapon for the left, I suppose, but in the digital age, everyone is carrying.

Because of that, in fact, the demise of late-night comedy is probably playing out in parallel to the demise of “clapter” comedy. The most successful comedians of the moment, like Nate Bargatze and Shane Gillis, aren’t strongly politically partisan because why would they be? Why offer something that’s cheap and ubiquitous, like derision of the left or right, when they have the talent to offer something that’s rare and valuable? “Clapter” is easy; comedy is hard.

Political evolution.

Politics has also evolved since Stewart’s heyday. Boy, has it ever.

Start with the fact that public opinion was far more changeable circa 2007 than it is now. George W. Bush’s job approval declined from 90 percent after 9/11 to around 50 percent when he was reelected in 2004 to 25 percent in the thick of the financial crisis in October 2008. In an environment like that, one could watch The Daily Show at the time and think, rightly or not, “This matters. This could move the needle.”

“The needle” no longer moves. As I write this, we’re more than two weeks into an apparent cover-up by the Justice Department of the full scope of misdeeds by a convicted sex trafficker who was good friends with the president, and Trump’s average approval rating has declined by a grand total of 1.3 points. “Clapter” content can’t break through to the other side when every voter who’s motivated to find counterarguments will find an instant, endless supply of them in the media diet they’ve curated for themselves.

Colbert doesn’t matter. Nothing does.

Another problem is specific to Trump and was described last year in a piece for The Dispatch by Jeff Maurer, who used to write for Oliver’s HBO show. “We’ve seen him hawk sneakers and try to buy Greenland and be indifferent about his vice president being lynched,” Maurer said of the president. “At this point, Trump could run over a leprechaun while driving that Willy Wonka car that burps foam and I wouldn’t bat an eye. Any joke that begins with the premise of ‘You won’t believe what Trump did today!’ is incorrect—I will believe it, because my sense of what’s possible has expanded.”

The best comedy finds absurdity in mundane experiences. What happens when America’s collective daily experience is relentlessly absurd?

Good comedy, especially good political comedy, also pokes at dignity and decorum. Think of Dana Carvey playing the first George Bush as daffy, babbling, “Nah gah do it.” There was an element of it in Stewart’s commentary about the second George Bush, too. For all of the then-president’s soaring grandeur about freedom and democracy, the deflating Daily Show critique was that he and his deputies were bumbling doofuses.

There’s no such dignity or decorum to puncture with Trump. He and his movement disdain the concepts. There is plenty of grandeur, but it’s so bombastic that it runs into Maurer’s problem of being too ridiculous to ridicule. What’s most distinctive about the president relative to his predecessors is his undisguised malevolence towards enemies, but that malevolence is a tricky subject for a comedian. If you make light of it, you’ll be accused of not treating it with the gravity it deserves. If you get outraged about it, you’ll end up chest-deep in “clapter” quicksand.

Colbert’s misfortune illustrates the problem. Trump really might have demanded his firing as a condition of approving Paramount’s merger with Skydance; look no further than the fact that the man who’s in charge of approving the merger is mocking liberals for mourning The Late Show. What should a comic do to make light of malevolence like that? On some level, comedy is about shaming its targets, and that which is shameless will not be shamed.

One more way in which politics in 2007 differed meaningfully from politics in 2025 was that, back then, the counterculture was liberal.

It had been for decades. Stewart slid easily into the role of left-wing hero because Americans were accustomed to left-wingers rebelling against an intractable military “quagmire.” The Daily Show gained populist cred the same way all successful populist enterprises do: by positioning itself as a truth-teller bent on exposing the hypocrisies of a corrupt but powerful establishment.

Colbert and the rest of the “clapter” industry would like to position themselves similarly. The problem is that the counterculture has moved right in the age of Trump.

Our Republican president is the most celebrated populist in America. The most influential populists in new media have migrated toward him in revolt against progressive cultural priorities, and the working class is headed in the same direction. Colbert can present himself as a truth-to-power liberal iconoclast in the Stewart mold if he likes, but in reality, he’s a sixty-something holdover of the exhausted “woke” establishment who gets his paycheck from dinosaur TV. Almost by definition, a figure matching that description can’t be culturally relevant in 2025.

In fact, although they’d never admit it amid their tears for The Late Show, liberals might silently be wondering whether the near-monopolization of late-night television by left-wing “clapter” comedy helped nudge some voters towards Republicans. The hardest cultural shoves came from mantras like “defund the police” and “trans women are women,” obviously, but wall-to-wall scorn on broadcast TV at bedtime for a populist president might have been another small inducement for some to “take the culture back.”

Requiem for the monoculture.

Much of the left’s grief over Colbert’s departure, I suspect, is driven by nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a right-wing phenomenon in our era, and probably in every era. Progressives seek “progress,” conservatives seek to conserve: One will be dispositionally more prone to romanticizing the past than the other.

Does anyone blame liberals for feeling misty-eyed, though, about the cultural power they’ve lost? Here was Stewart in his monologue on Monday night:

“If you’re trying to figure out why Stephen’s show is ending, I don’t think the answer can be found in some smoking gun email, or phone call from Trump to CBS executives, or in CBS’ spreadsheets on the financial health of late-night. I think the answer is in the fear and pre-compliance that is gripping all of America’s institutions at this very moment,” he concluded. “Institutions that have chosen not to fight the vengeful and vindictive actions of our pubic-hair-doodling commander-in-chief. This is not the moment to give in. I’m not giving in. I’m not going anywhere. … I think.”

Colbert’s firing comes after months of multi-front retreating by liberal-aligned institutions. Universities are capitulating to the president’s cultural demands in order to preserve their federal funding. Media conglomerates are shoveling bribes at him in the guise of settling lawsuits. Big Law is agreeing to indentured servitude on behalf of Trump’s favorite causes to protect its ability to practice. Corporate America is rolling up diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that might have invited the White House’s wrath.

In that context, losing a familiar left-wing TV host feels like an insult on top of injury, a gratuitous blow seemingly designed to demonstrate how comprehensive the surrender is. Leftists are nostalgic for the very recent past in which taking jabs at Trump’s idiocy on broadcast television wasn’t a serious professional risk.

Some progressives would respond that American institutions, including the media, have always been right-wing (even far right!), but that’s stupid, of course. The country’s institutional culture has leaned center-left over the last few decades because the educated professionals who populate those institutions have also been drifting left. And the so-called monoculture that prevailed before the digital age likewise tilted liberal—at least insofar as a demagogue as lowbrow and loathsome as Trump would have been gatekept to oblivion by its institutional guardians before he could gather political strength.

Colbert’s defenestration, then, feels like a requiem for the monoculture. It’s not just that liberals have lost their ability to gatekeep; it’s that the worst elements of the right, the very people whom the monoculture marginalized, have snatched that power from them and are using it against them. 

A few years ago, I would have welcomed that. Not anymore. With apologies to Ross Douthat: If you disliked the Colbert-era media, wait until you meet the post-Colbert media.