The Sultans of Cringe Who Killed Late-Night

They destroyed themselves chasing Trump and now can't accept failure.

Last night, the once and former “kings” of late-night “comedy” rallied around Stephen Colbert to show solidarity for what exactly? A fantasy of their own making. In such a dreamscape, the last ten years never happened. They didn’t destroy themselves trying to destroy Trump. Jon Stewart is still funny and relevant. Jimmy Kimmel remains a voice for America, and Stephen Colbert is a highly rated late-night comedy host who moves the needle in the discourse.

There was once splendour in the grass, glory in the flower. The late-night hosts crushed hard on their living virtue signal, their super cool president, Barack Obama. He makes them look good, and they like looking good. More than that, they liked feeling important.

In their fantasy LARPing, Stephen Colbert had become such a monumental threat to the almighty and omnipotent supervillain, Donald Trump, that he had to be FIRED to shut him up. That’s a little less dramatic than Jimmy Kimmel’s wild fantasy that Trump might put him in jail.

Yes, that’s right. In the middle of trying to stop the war in Ukraine, the war in Russia, manage the economy, and fend off yet another Me Too swarm from the likes of Dan Goldman and Nancy Pelosi, Trump would be up at night worrying about Colbert’s latest unfunny joke. As if.

The fantasy is that CBS “bent the knee” to Trump after they settled a lawsuit that alleged 60 Minutes edited the Kamala Harris interview to make her sound more coherent. Hey, at least that’s better than shelving the interview entirely because it was so bad it might have cost her the election.

So yeah. Reality, ain’t it a bitch?

Why would CBS want to make her look good heading into an election? Gee, that’s a hard one. I mean, it’s not like David Rhodes, the brother of bloviating, self-righteous scold and former Obama operative Ben Rhodes, wasn’t the president of CBS News from 2011 to 2019. That’s not weird, right?

We don’t need to dive down that rabbit hole to see what was right in front of our faces the whole time. The Sultans of Cringe belonged to Obama and the Democrats. Firing Stephen Colbert was less about Trump and a lawsuit than it was about putting a dying animal out of its misery. The thing couldn’t walk anymore.

Colbert’s response to all of this is to say, “go f*ck yourself.” He means Trump, his fatal attraction. But really, it’s to the American people. After all, they’re the ones who don’t watch his show anymore and the ones who voted for Trump.

Someday, people might look back on this moment and marvel at how there was once a thing called late-night comedy at all. They might also marvel that they thought it could last when they used it as nothing more than state-run propaganda for one political party, and that party just lost the popular vote.

The Left’s empire is collapsing, and it isn’t pretty. It isn’t just late-night. It’s all of network television, movie theaters, and the Oscars. Maybe changing times and technology would have put them all out of business anyway. It surely didn’t help that they have attached themselves to the least popular political party in modern American history.

Bridget Phetasy, a much funnier comedian than Stephen Colbert will ever be, had the best observation about the caterwauling over his firing:

Late-night comedy has become like the Bates Motel in Psycho - no customers once the interstate was built. Social media, podcasts, TikTok, and YouTube have not only surpassed network television entirely, but there is no replacement audience waiting in the wings. Stick a fork in it, it’s done.

Technology helped speed the decline, but the bigger problem has been the monoculture. In such a fast-paced ecosystem we have at our fingertips, it’s boring to see nothing but the same old thing every day. None of it goes viral unless it’s some resistance fighter’s Facebook timeline, preaching to the choir.

Comedians have always been valuable to us because we can laugh at things no one would dare talk about. You laugh because it relieves tension, and you laugh because it is true. The late-night LARPers can’t joke about things we can’t talk about. They are too afraid, and that has made them about as funny as Hillary Clinton is cool.

The trades announced proudly that Trump will be responsible for Colbert winning the Emmy this year, as if anyone outside their tiny bubble cares about either Colbert or the Emmys anymore.

Of course, the Television Academy will give him an Emmy, along with a teary, self-righteous standing ovation as a martyr for the cause. He’ll do fine making the jump to podcasts and YouTube. Failing upwards is one of the benefits of being a lifer in the cult.

Colbert was funny once, back when he played a pompous TV host who took himself too seriously. Not so funny when he became one.