Stephen Colbert Was Bad For America

The following article was originally posted on “The New Jerusalem” on Substack.

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In October, 2015, Vanity Fair magazine ran a feature story about television’s late night comedy talk shows. It was headlined “Host-to-Host Sensation.” The accompanying fold-out photo of ten top talk show comics caused a sensation of its own. Much imaginary ink was as if spilled over the shocking fact that all the hosts were men. But, of course, there was nothing shocking about that. Women aren’t funny. Even the funny ones aren’t that funny. As many another foolishly honest man has pointed out, women don’t need to be funny, not at a professional level at least. Overlooked, unathletic, angry high school boys need to be funny. If they’re not funny, their genetic strain will likely die with them. That’s the kind of urgent motivation that’s required to create a grown man with the insane courage to make jokes onstage and risk being met with dead silence.

But there was something that really was shocking about the Vanity Fair picture, something very few people who were not me bothered to mention. Every single comedy talk show host depicted — all ten of them — had exactly the same political opinions. They were all Left-wingers, and they would all come to detest and despise Donald Trump.

Now, you might say that was to be expected. The Venn Diagram of overlooked, unathletic, angry little men and Left-wing men is basically a circle with a small crescent of Nazis bulging out of one side. But what was shocking — and really kind of despicable — was this: the corporations who platformed these angry little funny leftists apparently saw no reason, financial or otherwise, to hire anyone to entertain the half of the audience who held more conservative views. Their idea seemed to be that they could make all the profits they needed by amusing one half of the audience at the expense of the other. They must have thought that was good business. They must have thought it was morally acceptable. They must have thought: “Screw you, half of America. We hurl disdain in your general direction!”

Well, strange to say, this business model did not perform all that well over time.

Listen, I’m a Christian man. I try very hard not to take pleasure in the misfortunes of my philosophical opponents. But in this case, I just can’t help it. The smug entitlement of an elite monoculture that despised the common man and woman — the men and women who, in the words of George Bailey, “do most of the working and paying and living and dying” in this country — was just begging for a comeuppance. And that uppance has come.

Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show on CBS has been cancelled and will go off the air next May. The show was making 40 million fewer dollars a year than the 130 million dollars it cost to produce. And while Colbert’s paltry ratings were the highest among his Left-wing colleagues, he and they were regularly being beaten by Greg Gutfeld, the libertarian smart aleck on Fox News. That’s cable, where the shows reach around half of the network audience, and where production costs are considerably lower.

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Now, Colbert was not born talentless. His Jon Stewart spin-off show, The Colbert Report, in which he satirized conservative commentators like Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, was often amusing. But once he landed the CBS late night spot in 2015, the laughter died. Maybe it was the big money. Maybe it was the Trump Derangement-fueled rage. Maybe it was being flattered by hand-picked audiences cheering wildly for unfunny rants. But something went sour inside Colbert. Lines like “The only thing Trump’s mouth is good for is being Putin’s cock holster,” might have seemed hilarious to the kind of ten-year-olds who laugh through their noses. But to adults — especially adults weary of having self-satisfied show biz millionaires insult them with a wholly undeserved tone of moral superiority — they seemed a tad juvenile.

But Colbert’s abilities are beside the point. Stephen Colbert was bad for America. Not on his own, maybe. On his own, he was just another Hollywood putz who mistakenly thought he had something important to say. But as a brick in a solid wall of Left-wing entertainment, he did more damage than any laughter could rectify.

Networks broadcast on airwaves that are a public trust. Their stations are licensed by a federal agency, the FCC. If the monologues on network late night comedy shows can be said to have any kind of higher purpose, surely it has something to do with bringing us together, helping us laugh in the evening at the politics and passions that drive us apart during the day. If you ridicule Barack Obama, then I’ll be willing to see what’s ridiculous about Donald Trump. If you make jokes about Ted Cruz, then maybe leftists will be able to find something funny about AOC. Fair both-sides comedy has the power to soften our angry certainties with self-awareness and humility.

But if instead, you declare late night a one political party zone, what comity can your comedy produce? If you think a crafty Chicago machine pol like Obama is so perfect that there is “not a flaw or hook that you can caricature,” (as one Saturday Night Live writer put it), why should I be amused when you hammer Trump for his many peccadillos night after night after night?

During the monologue in which Colbert announced his cancellation, he turned to the camera and told President Trump, “Go f— yourself.” But hadn’t he been saying exactly that for these many years to all the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump, who thought him, in their good will and wisdom, a better choice than the candidates Colbert supports?

What exactly did Colbert think he knew that allowed him to dismiss so many of his countrymen? Insult each night so many of his countrymen? Disparage and belittle so many of his countrymen by continually mocking their candidates while at the same time using his mouth as a cock holster for any lying, corrupt, incompetent, third rate Democrat lucky enough to come on his show?

What angel visited Stephen in the quiet of his cultural sequestration and told him it would be all right for him — and for every single one of his corporate comedy colleagues — to consider those tens of millions of Americans as nothing more than the butts of their jokes? If they had intended to convince those voters to change sides, wouldn’t it have been wiser to spread the jokes around even just a little? But that wasn’t their intention. They despised those voters. They hectored them out of the audience. They sent them a clear message: You are not worthy of being amused.

And, of course, it’s not just the comedians. It’s every morally flatulent entertainer who ever accepted his or her Oscar or Emmy or Grammy with a speech denouncing the politicians half the electorate prefers. As the writer tells the actress in the classic show biz film All About Eve: “I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind.”

For more than twenty years, I’ve been making speeches to conservatives, telling them they should pay more attention to the arts. To movies, to novels, to music and so on. I quote James Joyce to them: artists “forge the uncreated conscience” of a people. I quote Percy Shelley: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I tell them that complaining about movies and music and publishing will get them nowhere. The arts can only be redeemed by those who love them.

But maybe I was talking to the wrong people. Maybe I should have gone to the artists themselves. The arts aren’t leftist by nature, but they are liberal by nature. They find worth and dignity even in the Other. In the West, they always have. The Greeks mourned for the Trojan women. The Crusaders sang the nobility of their Muslim foes. Shakespeare reinvented the stock Evil Jew of the medieval Easter Play by granting him his full humanity.

Is there nothing of that spirit left in Hollywood? Or in publishing? Where conservative actors and writers have to talk in whispers? Where even to be a white male is to risk being barred from your vocation? No. They will not even award the Pulitzer to an iconic photograph depicting Trump’s courage under fire. They will not even put our glamorous First Lady on the covers of their fashion magazines. Ideology has made our cultural gatekeepers petty and small and mean.

Well, forgive me if that meanness has made me mean as well. The backlash is coming and has come, and I am glad to see it. With all my striving toward good will, the best I can muster for Stephen Colbert is to repeat to him the immortal words of a man more relevant, more daringly counter-cultural and, yes, a whole lot funnier than he is: “You’re fired.”

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The following article was originally posted on “The New Jerusalem” on Substack.

Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. Klavan is the bestselling author of numerous books, including the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The fifth installment, After That, The Dark, is now available for Pre-Order. Follow him on X: @andrewklavan

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.