TV’s Most Humorless Late-Night Hosts Gather To Obsess Over Trump

The late-night comedy brigade gathered together during the final days of Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” to participate in their favorite activity: obsessing about President Trump.

Colbert hosted fellow late-night comedy hosts, including Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver, on Monday’s episode as he gears up for the show’s big finale on May 21.

Kimmel, who was briefly suspended last fall after making false comments about the man who assassinated Charlie Kirk, suggested that viewers should watch more late-night television and cancel Paramount+. 

“We have a lot of shows. 30,000 people watching each one, and it adds up,” Kimmel said. “People watch us on YouTube now. People have a lot of different options and they keep coming to us. I will tell you, when I got knocked off the air for a few days, people canceled Disney+. Why aren’t people canceling Paramount+? Because you never had it in the first place?”

He also responded to Colbert’s question about whether any of the other hosts ever expected to be “doing a job that the president of the United States would have strong feelings about.”

“You know what’s even weirder? Doing a job that his wife has strong feelings about,” Kimmel replied, referring to the criticism he received for his tasteless joke about the first lady being an “expectant widow” just days before a man attempted to assassinate Trump. 

Meyers, who has hosted NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers since 2014, said he appreciates having Trump as a fan. “The thing I like, he posts when the show airs, and I want to say I appreciate that he is watching linear television,” Meyers said during the “Late Show” appearance. “If I would make my case for late-night, it’s that leaders of the free world are watching it when it airs.”

CBS announced that “The Late Show” was ending in July 2025, mentioning that it was “purely a financial decision.” However, some have speculated that Colbert’s show was canceled due to the merger between Paramount and Skydance. 

Colbert has been vocally opposed to CBS’s decision to pull the plug on the show despite reports that the program was losing $40 million annually.

The political commentator went on to blame the format rather than the content of the show.

“It’s possible that two things can be true,” Colbert told NYT. “Broadcast can be in trouble. They cannot monetize because of things like YouTube, because of the competition of streaming. They’ve got the books, and I do not have any desire to debate them over what they say their business model is and how it does not work for them anymore. But less than two years before they called to say it’s over, they were very eager for me to be signed for a long time. So, something changed.”