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Back in 1979, Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes asked late-night talk show host Johnny Carson, “Do you get sensitive about the fact that people say he’ll never joke about a serious controversy?”
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By “people,” of course, Wallace meant left-leaning media personalities like himself. It’s highly unlikely that even a small fraction of the 7 million Americans who tuned into The Tonight Show every night at 11:30 to watch Carson interview “cuchi-cuchi” Charo or Rodney Dangerfield were itching to hear the host pontificate on monetary issues or the Middle East.
What Wallace likely meant — and what contemporary activists who pressure entertainers into speaking on political issues mean — wasn’t that critics wanted Carson to speak on “serious controversies” but that he should speak in ways that pleased their sensibilities.
After all, Carson “was by instinct and upbringing definitely Republican” of the centrist Eisenhower brand, according to Henry Bushkin, one of the host’s biographers. If Carson had incessantly bashed Democrats for the disasters that leftism showered on the 1970s, Wallace would almost certainly have been asking the talk show host what he thought about “people” who wondered why he felt the need to weigh in on serious controversies.
In any event, Carson answered: “It’s a danger. It’s a real danger once you start that. You start to get that self-important feeling that what you say has great import. And you know, strangely enough, you could use that show as a forum. You could sway people, and I don’t think you should as an entertainer.”
Carson could easily have been describing one-time comedian and liberal evangelist Stephen Colbert.
After 33 years, Colbert will bury CBS’s Late Night franchise this week. Colbert found fame mocking Republicans during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, playing a caricature of then-popular Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. The self-indulgent partisan dreck he pumped out later was more insufferable than anything he mocked.
Colbert convinced himself, it seems, that there was a great moral imperative to speak out nightly, because in these unprecedented times the nation might spiral into fascism.
Carson, incidentally, became the host of The Tonight Show only a few weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis began, perhaps the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war. His tenure spanned the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, civil rights battles, Vietnam, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, five recessions, and the fall of communism, and it ended the year after the first Gulf War. Somehow, the country survived without daily political commentary from Carson. Most Americans who stayed up late to watch him were probably happy to take a break from the news.
Today, we are offered little reprieve. The common cultural moments that Carson brought to the country — The Tonight Show might have a Catskills comedian and a country singer on the same night, and it would make complete sense — barely exist today.
Colbert? Well, the host did his best to normalize the most radical left-wingers in the country.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the nation’s highest-ranking Marxist, appeared on The Late Show 22 times as a guest, the most frequent politician guest in late-night talk history. Is Sanders’s class warfare whining really that appealing or entertaining to the masses? As far as I can tell, Colbert never once asked the red diaper baby anything resembling a critical question.
Other guests whom Colbert lifted on his show since the 2015 election of President Donald Trump were antisemites such as Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, and socialists such as former Democratic Missouri Rep. Cori Bush and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). An interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (he/him), who maintains that God is “nonbinary” and white skin spreads the “virus” of racism, was put online after concerns about violating the Federal Communications Commission’s “equal time” rule.
During the recent NYC mayoral race, Colbert had on Hamas apologist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, along with City Comptroller Brad Lander.
Yes, the Brad Lander. What a tremendous thrill it must have been for the late-night audience to hear from a city accountant.
Though it’s not fair to say that Colbert never had on a Republican. Trump-haters, former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were also on. By one measure, the host had 176 left-leaning or Democratic guests, or 99% of his visitors.
Carson, despite perceptions, did have political guests such as Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jerry Brown, Ted Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. The point, judging from old clips, was to show the human side of these political celebrities, not to use the show as a campaign stop.
Colbert, whose legacy Eric Deggans at NPR says was that he “distinguished truth from truthiness,” is free to feature anyone he likes on the show. He can also be out of business. The monotonous, one-sided, cringy disparagement would become painful for anyone who wasn’t obsessed with politics to watch. One of the problems is that leftists simply can’t ridicule themselves. Not really.
Not long ago, ABC’s The View co-host Joy Behar noted that scandal-ridden Obama gave comedians “nothing to make fun of.” This is a running contention from the Left. In a 2009 Maureen Dowd piece headlined “May We Mock, Barack?,” the New York Times columnist relays a conversation she had with Colbert and fellow comedian Jon Stewart on whether it “seems like a President Obama would be harder to make fun of” than other politicians.
’Are you kidding me?’ Stewart scoffed.”
Then he and Colbert both said at the same time: “His dad was a goat-herder!”
You’ll notice that the “joke” isn’t about Obama. Nor are any of the others in the piece. They’re aimed at the slack-jawed, closed-minded conservatives who harbor unreasonable criticism about Obama.
As it turns out, this was the entirety of Colbert’s schtick.
Now, obviously, Colbert’s demise wasn’t only about his insufferable sermonizing. These celebrity interview shows are becoming prohibitively expensive to produce. CBS was probably losing tons of money on the antiquated talk-show model. Colbert, who was making somewhere between $15 million and $20 million per year, was reportedly hemorrhaging about $40 million annually. The show’s ad revenue had fallen to $70 million last year from $121 million in 2018.
Podcasts can be made for a fraction of the cost and pull bigger audiences. In my estimation, former late-night host “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” is far more entertaining than any institutional talk show. But when you transform a traditional late-night institution into partisan pep rallies that turn off half the nation, the prospects of overcoming structural problems are incredibly low.
Watching a comedian satirize the pompous partisan news hosts was occasionally funny. Watching a comedian turn into one was tedious.
