When CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last summer, they said it was “purely a financial decision” and cited declining ad revenue, but the timing was more than suspicious. Earlier that month, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, had settled a $16 million lawsuit from President Donald Trump, who alleged deceptively positive editing of a 60 Minutes interview with his 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris. The settlement came as Paramount was waiting for federal approval of a merger with a company owned by a major Trump supporter. “A big, fat bribe” is how Colbert described the settlement in his monologue. Three days later, the show got the ax. Its final episode will air May 21.
CBS didn’t just get rid of Colbert; it scrapped the entire three-decades-old top-rated franchise. And it hasn’t been hands-off in the show’s final months. In February, the network pulled an interview Colbert did with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico about Christian nationalism over fears it might cause the Trump administration to invoke the “equal time” requirement for political coverage, a rule that has previously exempted interview programs such as Colbert’s. Talarico later shared it online, calling it “the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see.”
The president has hardly made his opinions about Colbert a secret, calling him “a no-talent guy” and “a lowlife” and threatening to use the power of the Federal Communications Commission to silence him. That Trump has gotten his wish not only confirms how thin-skinned he is but how powerful Colbert has been, as one of the president’s sharpest and most fearless critics. Colbert’s tenure on The Late Show roughly paralleled Trump’s political career, and he used his platform to expose the president’s flaws and lies with humor.
Colbert is not the only late-night host to find himself in the administration’s crosshairs: Trump regularly insults Jimmy Kimmel, and pressure from the White House led the Disney-owned ABC to suspend Kimmel’s show last fall after a joke about murdered right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The network reinstated Kimmel after three million Americans canceled their subscriptions of Disney+ and Disney-owned Hulu in protest, but few of those protesters are regular late-night viewers. In fact, viewership of late-night network television has declined significantly over the past decade, leading some to suspect the venerable institution of the late-night talk show, popularized by the legendary Johnny Carson, may be on its last legs.
In the early 2000s, polls found that younger Americans got most of their political news from late-night comedy shows, like The Daily Show and its spinoff The Colbert Report, rather than from network news or print. Today, the preferred news source of the under-thirty set is social media, and they are likely to only encounter Colbert on YouTube, X, or Instagram. I’ll admit that I no longer stay up to watch Colbert live and instead rely on clips shared on social media the next morning. The way we view late-night comedy may have changed, but it can still be influential and necessary in a political environment that increasingly suppresses dissent. A recent CNN documentary on Colbert, The Last Laugh, places Colbert in the tradition of noteworthy political satire that goes back to Tammany Hall cartoons.
In today’s late-night milieu, Colbert is the master. In just the past few weeks, Colbert zinged the administration on its bait-and-switch about who would pay for his billion-dollar ballroom, mocked the Pentagon for trying to restart the clock on the Iran War by rebranding it, and fact-checked House Speaker Mike Johnson about just-war theory. He brings attention to Trump’s countless gaffes, many of which are ignored by other media, and exposes his lies by splicing together the president’s own contradictory statements. His comedic timing also makes his one-on-one interviews compelling, whether with actors, musicians, authors, priests, or presidents. Last week, he got former President Barack Obama to warn about the politicization of the justice system and the military without naming Trump. Colbert even interviewed Trump in 2015 in the early stages of his first presidential campaign and thanked him for his assistance. “I’m not going to say this stuff writes itself, but you certainly do deliver it on time every day,” Colbert told him.
Colbert began his late-night comedic career on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, where he parodied conservative cable pundits—a schtick he would later expand into his own show. (On The Daily Show, Colbert also pioneered the religion-news segment, “This Week in God,” a favorite of this religion reporter.) On The Colbert Report, which ran from 2005 to 2014, he highlighted the hypocrisy of right-wing blowhards through his alternative persona, an only slightly exaggerated version of the real-life Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh. That he demanded a silent “T” in “Report” was just one example of the know-it-all attitude that eschewed actual facts, which Colbert later termed “truthiness.”
In 2015, he moved to CBS’s The Late Show, succeeding David Letterman and taking the show in a more political direction. While Colbert’s satire show was funnier, I actually prefer the real Stephen Colbert to his parody persona. It reveals his authentic values of honesty, integrity, justice, compassion, and human dignity—many of which clearly come from the Catholic faith he grew up with as the youngest of eleven children and which he continues to practice as an adult. There’s no doubt he has helped put a positive face on liberal Catholicism, but his influence goes beyond the fact that he has taught Sunday school at his parish and met with Pope Francis. (I maintain, however, that his liturgical dance to “The King of Glory” is his funniest performance ever—something only a Catholic who grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s could know to mock.)
By serving as a voice for truth and challenging Americans to think more critically about complex political issues, Colbert will go down in history as more than a comedian. He’ll be remembered as one of the bravest and most effective cultural critics of his generation. Although he has joked about running for president, Colbert has said his next project involves cowriting a Lord of the Rings film. CBS—and Trump—may think they have silenced Colbert, but I suspect we haven’t heard the last of him. As Letterman told Colbert last week on The Late Show, “You can take a man’s show. You can’t take a man’s voice.”
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