Good riddance. Colbert along with John Oliver and Jimmy Kimmel have become insufferable. They force you to ask do the Democrats ever do anything funny anymore because they certainly would never joke about it.
Does anyone remember when comedians were willing to make fun of the foibles of both parties? Now Colbert, Kimmel, and Oliver are so one sided they sound like scolds. Only Bill Maher, Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle are willing to take shots at both sides. They remain funny. The others not.
This seems incorrect? Watch any current Daily Show segment, they mock liberal politicians all the time. Even when they clearly do so from a liberal perspective ("This politician is out of touch and failing to achieve liberal aims"), they certainly don't refrain from calling Chuck Schumer or Joe Biden or any Democrat out for being ineffective and weak. The idea that liberal politicians are somehow sacred cows in all of liberal comedy seems obviously wrong.
I'd say the biggest difference between Stewart/Oliver and the people you mention is a drive to mock liberal voters, rather than politicians. There's a kind of overt cruelty to it that feels asymmetrical. Right-wing comedians like Gervais are eager to mock marginalized leftist communities (like trans people), but left-wing comedians don't spend an equivalent amount of time symmetrically mocking caricatures of Cletus the slack-jawed Alabama yokel.
In general, left-wing comedy tends to target the powerful (politicians) and right-wing comedy tends to target the weak (trans people, immigrants, racial minorities, etc.) This feels like the biggest practical difference between the two, far more than any pretensions towards 'Smugness' or whatever. You seriously think Greg Gutfeld and Ricky Gervais aren't smug people?
Kira: An interesting response. Where I think you err is in believing that trans people, racial minorities and immigrants are “weak” in the woke world we have recently lived in. The reverse is true and it is only slowly becoming more equal.
I think this is correct in a sense. Liberal culture really values giving protection to the weak, and takes status from people who are seen to actively attack weak and vulnerable minorities. It regards this as a kind of mitigating measure against individual abuse, where the only way to you protect the vulnerable is by exacting high social costs from even powerful people who try to target them.
I think conservatives often misread this though, and assume that because you can't costlessly make fun of trans people in liberal society, that trans people or immigrants are somehow "strong" in every other sense. The idea is that they're somehow ruling over and dominating all of liberal culture and enforcing their will. I think this largely isn't true of even woke liberalism, and the people with the most money and power and direct influence in liberal society still tend to be predominantly white and male normies rather than minorities. The most powerful opinion-setters I met in college weren't the immigrants or the trans people, it was white male professors who were eager to talk about how deferent they were towards the needs of immigrants and trans people.
This whole thing probably looks weird and confusing from the outside. I think a lot of conservatives get really frustrated by it, and we've seen a huge demand for Republican Wokeness that will culturally give the social protection to white men that minorities enjoy. But it's important to understand that the social capital minorities receive in liberal culture is actually very specific and very limited in scope. Minorities still tend to be predominantly poor and live pretty rough lives, on net. They're not the kings or the princes, more like the blind oracles in the temple. Given special deference and privileges from certain aspects of liberal society, but easily cast aside if things turn bad.
I think this is something that Richard missed. The three you mention and others have turned into such smug, moralizing scolds, with such perfect fidelity to the Bluesky daily talking points, that they turn off even many people whose politics are basically aligned with them. That is notably not true, for instance, of the people you mention and also some of the writers on SNL, who are still willing to ridicule Democrats, at least when the fruit hangs low enough.
Left or right, the people who are visibly playing scared, afraid of being canceled by their "side," are just not funny.
My counterpoint to this argument is Bargatze. He was the top-grossing comic last year. His comedy is also apolitical, which contradicts what Richard is saying. I think his success demonstrates that he occupies an underserved niche. Even if that niche is smaller than it once was.
I'm surrounded by conservatives in real life. Unlike Colbert, Gutfeld is someone I've only heard mentioned on the Internet. Have never watched his show; seems insufferable. But it seems like everyone, young or old, enjoys Bargatze. Of course, his comedy is clean and he grew up in the church, so he appeals to Christian audiences. But his dry and at times surreal style also plays well with more liberal audiences, hence his multiple gigs hosting SNL.
I like Nate Bargatze but it wouldn't surprise me at all to see the bluesky crowd find some insane reason to call him a heteronormative Christian fascist.
Maybe on Bluesky. But to a majority of Democrat voters he is acceptable. They let him host SNL twice in short succession and no one complained.
If he gets bigger, then at some point his church is going to be identified, as was the case with Chris Pratt, and he'll get smeared for it. That will cost him some fans on the left. But Pratt is still alive and well in major mainstream products. I think the median Democrat voter is prepared to tolerate Christian entertainers going to church, as long as their product still has mass appeal.
SNL has also had the comedian Shane Gillis host multiple times, and people were angry enough about him to get him fired as a castmember before his first show.
Gillis got in trouble not for who he IS (like Chris Pratt or, in my scenario, perhaps Bargatze in the future) but his comedy itself. Specifically edgy, racial jokes. I think what this shows is that when the activist class attacks you over your material, it creates a lot more roadblocks for your career than when they attack you over your identity.
Even then, did SNL's left-leaning audience as a whole have a problem with Gillis, or just the activist class? I'm not sure, haven't followed closely enough. Of course, both are relevant to economics: activists can scare away advertisers, even if the audience doesn't leave.
The conclusion I draw is it's tough to do "edgy" -- and especially to talk about race! -- and be apolitical. I haven't watched much of the late night guys (I'm thinking Carson onwards), but I think they have generally stayed away from race.
But Bargatze shows that even in Current Year, you can stay away from edginess or politics, do clean comedy, and still draw a broad audience that doesn't just consist of homeschooled families and nursing homes.
I think it was a narrow class that had a problem with Gillis. I don't think advertisers punished SNL for bringing him onto host SNL, he recently hosted ESPN's Espies (which I heard about because of people complaining), his show on Netflix just got renewed for a third season.
Jim Gaffigan is a standup comedian that does inoffensive jokes about food. He seems quite successful.
Professional comedy needs to be pretty clever to be worth engaging with. Else, why not just trade hacky jokes with your friends? I'm no Republican and Fox News is terrible, but Colbert and ilk stopped being clever enough to bother with. Colbert Report was great. Late Show with him was not. Plus, once you understand even Econ 101, it's pretty unfunny to listen to people as they reveal their complete ignorance.
Politicians must do new and novel things to generate new and novel political jokes. Unfortunately, politicians, like criminals, are one-trick ponies.
Election years probably make good political jokes possible because there is a new cast of politicians, each generating at least one novel thing that will generate a novel joke. Off years, not so many novel things to generate novel political jokes.
Maybe comedians should push for term limits to get new material more often.
I think part is that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert's intended comedy not just targetted liberals, but also a wide range of demographics. It was mildly funny to many liberals, but very funny to few. In contrast to the Colbert Report, which was the type of humour I think young men are more into. That switch made it seem to the young men on the internet that Colbert became unfunny, when really he shifted audiences
Fox News has existed far longer than political comedy hasn't been funny. Although Colbert was never *that* funny.
If someone never noticed the shift from clever (funny) satirization to ham-fisted insults or arguments, I question whether that person has a sense of humour at all.
Humour makes you laugh when it displays intelligence. It notices connections between things; it demonstrates an apprehension of nuances. Jon Stewart could make me laugh even if he was saying something objectively questionable: because just the idea of it was funny.
The Onion was putting out headlines to the effect of "Population Honestly Just Tired of this Trump Shit," and it left a hole so big that conservatives started trying to do comedy (the Bee is often unfunny in the same way but it did have a few good ones).
Let's look at a random Bee headline: "Israel botches genocide by sending millions in food aid to Gaza."
Apparently if you support Israel, this is going to be hilarious just because you agree with the point. I can make a comedy career off such an audience, feeding them Ben Shapiro monologues reframed as jokes.
Richard's disdain for Republicans doesn't give him the opportunity to be even handed -- as he needs to insult the GOP with every turn. Even in a topic as easy as this -- Colbert is a dickhead and not funny, as his show loses $10's of millions proving he's not funny. End of story.
Gotta say that Vax Scene bit was absolutely terrifying, my equivalent of a Soviet child taking a closer look at his supermarket and realizing there's no food and it's all cardboard cutouts.
I don't think Jimmy Fallon is regarded a political (and many on the left dislike him because of that), but his schtick seems entirely possible (even if the general erosion of linear TV ratings applies to him as well). Conan O'Brien is thought of as weirder, but not more political.
> The type of comedy performed by John Oliver and Stephen Colbert would hardly make sense in a world without Fox News
Coincidentally, Fox News and The Daily Show both started in 1996.
I don't think it's surprising that people enjoy Colbert's show, but do they enjoy it as humor? Plenty of people enjoy reading you, but you're not funny. That's not meant to be an insult. You don't write a humor substack, even if you occasionally sprinkle in some chuckle-worthy comments. I don't think his show is really comedy anymore than Rachel Maddow's or Tucker Carlson's. That doesn't mean it's bad or his politics are bad or that he's bad, just that this conversation misclassifies him.
There is a market for comedians making political and cultural observations, but it's a less lucrative one. That's arguably what Joe Rogan's podcast is and it's one of the most successful. But Rogan's episodes don't cost six figures an hour. I think Colbert will land on his feet making a podcast that's able to turn a profit doing the same stuff he does now but with a much lower cost.
Edit: I browsed the show's subreddit to see what fans thought but most recent posts are about the cancellation. I did find one topic from 2024 that talked about the possibility of the show ending. While many people say they want the show to continue, no one says it's because they need the laughs.
If you look at many of the "culture war" issues that divide Republicans and Democrats, the partisan divide wasn't that great in the 1980s. Most Democrats disapproved of gay marriage; they supported border security; views on race weren't as partisan as they are today. Democrats had a sizeable conservative faction; the Rockefeller Republicans were liberal.
It was only in the 1990s that ideological sorting began to accelerate, with conservatives fleeing the Democrats and liberals fleeing the Republicans (see Kevin Philips).
In the beginning of the Bush presidency, 9/11 helped to obscure and disguise these deep divisions. By 2005, when the Colbert Report first aired, the honeymoon was over.
Comedy is tied to a crisis of authority and legitimacy. When you believe that the two parties are both legitimate (even if you prefer one over the other), you afford each one a degree of respect and decorum. As faith in democracy declines, humor becomes a weapon, and everything is fair game.
The Trump era has been bad for political humor. The problem for me is making fun of Trump or his supporters seems like punching down. This is because of the way the Republican Party has changed from a party of wealthy elites to the party of the proles. Making fun of proles is not funny, not even their wealthy and powerful leader.
It seemed so different just one Republican ago. Bush and Cheney represented rich elites in a way that Trump doesn’t.
The people to mock today are the woke elite, but the talented comedians don’t want to target them. It’s a tough situation.
There is some truth to this, but you can laugh at the proles if you are clever about it. You can joke about anything if you are clever.
Earlier John Oliver stuff made fun of the bottom of society, but it was funny because he found really hokey stuff and it highlighted how you shouldn't burden unintelligent people with bad incentives.
Comedy seems like a very natural fit for short-form media. Many memes (specifically the known-image-with-text format) are very funny. In comparison, movies or tv shows that are comedy-based have a lot of filler. So it is no surprise to me that the rise of social media would make long-form comedy less appealing.
An odd occasion when I have strong disagreement with you. I’ve always thought willingness to offend vastly increases humor. Here’s a great example: https://youtu.be/ZDu0-L-pAes?si=dRAZQKhm-ez7B-75
Good riddance. Colbert along with John Oliver and Jimmy Kimmel have become insufferable. They force you to ask do the Democrats ever do anything funny anymore because they certainly would never joke about it.
Does anyone remember when comedians were willing to make fun of the foibles of both parties? Now Colbert, Kimmel, and Oliver are so one sided they sound like scolds. Only Bill Maher, Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle are willing to take shots at both sides. They remain funny. The others not.
This seems incorrect? Watch any current Daily Show segment, they mock liberal politicians all the time. Even when they clearly do so from a liberal perspective ("This politician is out of touch and failing to achieve liberal aims"), they certainly don't refrain from calling Chuck Schumer or Joe Biden or any Democrat out for being ineffective and weak. The idea that liberal politicians are somehow sacred cows in all of liberal comedy seems obviously wrong.
I'd say the biggest difference between Stewart/Oliver and the people you mention is a drive to mock liberal voters, rather than politicians. There's a kind of overt cruelty to it that feels asymmetrical. Right-wing comedians like Gervais are eager to mock marginalized leftist communities (like trans people), but left-wing comedians don't spend an equivalent amount of time symmetrically mocking caricatures of Cletus the slack-jawed Alabama yokel.
In general, left-wing comedy tends to target the powerful (politicians) and right-wing comedy tends to target the weak (trans people, immigrants, racial minorities, etc.) This feels like the biggest practical difference between the two, far more than any pretensions towards 'Smugness' or whatever. You seriously think Greg Gutfeld and Ricky Gervais aren't smug people?
Kira: An interesting response. Where I think you err is in believing that trans people, racial minorities and immigrants are “weak” in the woke world we have recently lived in. The reverse is true and it is only slowly becoming more equal.
I think this is correct in a sense. Liberal culture really values giving protection to the weak, and takes status from people who are seen to actively attack weak and vulnerable minorities. It regards this as a kind of mitigating measure against individual abuse, where the only way to you protect the vulnerable is by exacting high social costs from even powerful people who try to target them.
I think conservatives often misread this though, and assume that because you can't costlessly make fun of trans people in liberal society, that trans people or immigrants are somehow "strong" in every other sense. The idea is that they're somehow ruling over and dominating all of liberal culture and enforcing their will. I think this largely isn't true of even woke liberalism, and the people with the most money and power and direct influence in liberal society still tend to be predominantly white and male normies rather than minorities. The most powerful opinion-setters I met in college weren't the immigrants or the trans people, it was white male professors who were eager to talk about how deferent they were towards the needs of immigrants and trans people.
This whole thing probably looks weird and confusing from the outside. I think a lot of conservatives get really frustrated by it, and we've seen a huge demand for Republican Wokeness that will culturally give the social protection to white men that minorities enjoy. But it's important to understand that the social capital minorities receive in liberal culture is actually very specific and very limited in scope. Minorities still tend to be predominantly poor and live pretty rough lives, on net. They're not the kings or the princes, more like the blind oracles in the temple. Given special deference and privileges from certain aspects of liberal society, but easily cast aside if things turn bad.
I think this is something that Richard missed. The three you mention and others have turned into such smug, moralizing scolds, with such perfect fidelity to the Bluesky daily talking points, that they turn off even many people whose politics are basically aligned with them. That is notably not true, for instance, of the people you mention and also some of the writers on SNL, who are still willing to ridicule Democrats, at least when the fruit hangs low enough.
Left or right, the people who are visibly playing scared, afraid of being canceled by their "side," are just not funny.
You clearly did not read the article and just came down here to comment
My counterpoint to this argument is Bargatze. He was the top-grossing comic last year. His comedy is also apolitical, which contradicts what Richard is saying. I think his success demonstrates that he occupies an underserved niche. Even if that niche is smaller than it once was.
I'm surrounded by conservatives in real life. Unlike Colbert, Gutfeld is someone I've only heard mentioned on the Internet. Have never watched his show; seems insufferable. But it seems like everyone, young or old, enjoys Bargatze. Of course, his comedy is clean and he grew up in the church, so he appeals to Christian audiences. But his dry and at times surreal style also plays well with more liberal audiences, hence his multiple gigs hosting SNL.
Hanania's argument needs to be refined a little bit. I would say'
- With increased polarization, few political jokes can appeal to both sides.
- With increased politicization, fewer topics are considered non-political (e.g. Sydney Sweeney's new commercial).
So it's still possible to make funny non-political jokes, but it's getting harder.
I like Nate Bargatze but it wouldn't surprise me at all to see the bluesky crowd find some insane reason to call him a heteronormative Christian fascist.
Maybe on Bluesky. But to a majority of Democrat voters he is acceptable. They let him host SNL twice in short succession and no one complained.
If he gets bigger, then at some point his church is going to be identified, as was the case with Chris Pratt, and he'll get smeared for it. That will cost him some fans on the left. But Pratt is still alive and well in major mainstream products. I think the median Democrat voter is prepared to tolerate Christian entertainers going to church, as long as their product still has mass appeal.
SNL has also had the comedian Shane Gillis host multiple times, and people were angry enough about him to get him fired as a castmember before his first show.
Gillis got in trouble not for who he IS (like Chris Pratt or, in my scenario, perhaps Bargatze in the future) but his comedy itself. Specifically edgy, racial jokes. I think what this shows is that when the activist class attacks you over your material, it creates a lot more roadblocks for your career than when they attack you over your identity.
Even then, did SNL's left-leaning audience as a whole have a problem with Gillis, or just the activist class? I'm not sure, haven't followed closely enough. Of course, both are relevant to economics: activists can scare away advertisers, even if the audience doesn't leave.
The conclusion I draw is it's tough to do "edgy" -- and especially to talk about race! -- and be apolitical. I haven't watched much of the late night guys (I'm thinking Carson onwards), but I think they have generally stayed away from race.
But Bargatze shows that even in Current Year, you can stay away from edginess or politics, do clean comedy, and still draw a broad audience that doesn't just consist of homeschooled families and nursing homes.
I think it was a narrow class that had a problem with Gillis. I don't think advertisers punished SNL for bringing him onto host SNL, he recently hosted ESPN's Espies (which I heard about because of people complaining), his show on Netflix just got renewed for a third season.
Jim Gaffigan is a standup comedian that does inoffensive jokes about food. He seems quite successful.
Professional comedy needs to be pretty clever to be worth engaging with. Else, why not just trade hacky jokes with your friends? I'm no Republican and Fox News is terrible, but Colbert and ilk stopped being clever enough to bother with. Colbert Report was great. Late Show with him was not. Plus, once you understand even Econ 101, it's pretty unfunny to listen to people as they reveal their complete ignorance.
Politicians must do new and novel things to generate new and novel political jokes. Unfortunately, politicians, like criminals, are one-trick ponies.
Election years probably make good political jokes possible because there is a new cast of politicians, each generating at least one novel thing that will generate a novel joke. Off years, not so many novel things to generate novel political jokes.
Maybe comedians should push for term limits to get new material more often.
I think part is that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert's intended comedy not just targetted liberals, but also a wide range of demographics. It was mildly funny to many liberals, but very funny to few. In contrast to the Colbert Report, which was the type of humour I think young men are more into. That switch made it seem to the young men on the internet that Colbert became unfunny, when really he shifted audiences
Well, Viacom’s shareholders certainly didn’t think losing $40 million a year was funny.
Fox News has existed far longer than political comedy hasn't been funny. Although Colbert was never *that* funny.
If someone never noticed the shift from clever (funny) satirization to ham-fisted insults or arguments, I question whether that person has a sense of humour at all.
Humour makes you laugh when it displays intelligence. It notices connections between things; it demonstrates an apprehension of nuances. Jon Stewart could make me laugh even if he was saying something objectively questionable: because just the idea of it was funny.
The Onion was putting out headlines to the effect of "Population Honestly Just Tired of this Trump Shit," and it left a hole so big that conservatives started trying to do comedy (the Bee is often unfunny in the same way but it did have a few good ones).
Let's look at a random Bee headline: "Israel botches genocide by sending millions in food aid to Gaza."
Apparently if you support Israel, this is going to be hilarious just because you agree with the point. I can make a comedy career off such an audience, feeding them Ben Shapiro monologues reframed as jokes.
Colbert’s show decline is not because it is political but because it’s completely one sided.
Richard's disdain for Republicans doesn't give him the opportunity to be even handed -- as he needs to insult the GOP with every turn. Even in a topic as easy as this -- Colbert is a dickhead and not funny, as his show loses $10's of millions proving he's not funny. End of story.
Gotta say that Vax Scene bit was absolutely terrifying, my equivalent of a Soviet child taking a closer look at his supermarket and realizing there's no food and it's all cardboard cutouts.
I don't think Jimmy Fallon is regarded a political (and many on the left dislike him because of that), but his schtick seems entirely possible (even if the general erosion of linear TV ratings applies to him as well). Conan O'Brien is thought of as weirder, but not more political.
> The type of comedy performed by John Oliver and Stephen Colbert would hardly make sense in a world without Fox News
Coincidentally, Fox News and The Daily Show both started in 1996.
I don't think it's surprising that people enjoy Colbert's show, but do they enjoy it as humor? Plenty of people enjoy reading you, but you're not funny. That's not meant to be an insult. You don't write a humor substack, even if you occasionally sprinkle in some chuckle-worthy comments. I don't think his show is really comedy anymore than Rachel Maddow's or Tucker Carlson's. That doesn't mean it's bad or his politics are bad or that he's bad, just that this conversation misclassifies him.
There is a market for comedians making political and cultural observations, but it's a less lucrative one. That's arguably what Joe Rogan's podcast is and it's one of the most successful. But Rogan's episodes don't cost six figures an hour. I think Colbert will land on his feet making a podcast that's able to turn a profit doing the same stuff he does now but with a much lower cost.
Edit: I browsed the show's subreddit to see what fans thought but most recent posts are about the cancellation. I did find one topic from 2024 that talked about the possibility of the show ending. While many people say they want the show to continue, no one says it's because they need the laughs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LateShow/comments/1gkt9n7/will_stephen_retire_in_the_next_few_years/
If you look at many of the "culture war" issues that divide Republicans and Democrats, the partisan divide wasn't that great in the 1980s. Most Democrats disapproved of gay marriage; they supported border security; views on race weren't as partisan as they are today. Democrats had a sizeable conservative faction; the Rockefeller Republicans were liberal.
It was only in the 1990s that ideological sorting began to accelerate, with conservatives fleeing the Democrats and liberals fleeing the Republicans (see Kevin Philips).
In the beginning of the Bush presidency, 9/11 helped to obscure and disguise these deep divisions. By 2005, when the Colbert Report first aired, the honeymoon was over.
Comedy is tied to a crisis of authority and legitimacy. When you believe that the two parties are both legitimate (even if you prefer one over the other), you afford each one a degree of respect and decorum. As faith in democracy declines, humor becomes a weapon, and everything is fair game.
The Trump era has been bad for political humor. The problem for me is making fun of Trump or his supporters seems like punching down. This is because of the way the Republican Party has changed from a party of wealthy elites to the party of the proles. Making fun of proles is not funny, not even their wealthy and powerful leader.
It seemed so different just one Republican ago. Bush and Cheney represented rich elites in a way that Trump doesn’t.
The people to mock today are the woke elite, but the talented comedians don’t want to target them. It’s a tough situation.
Just stop caring about "punching down" or "punching up". Punch in the direction of being funny.
There is some truth to this, but you can laugh at the proles if you are clever about it. You can joke about anything if you are clever.
Earlier John Oliver stuff made fun of the bottom of society, but it was funny because he found really hokey stuff and it highlighted how you shouldn't burden unintelligent people with bad incentives.
Comedy seems like a very natural fit for short-form media. Many memes (specifically the known-image-with-text format) are very funny. In comparison, movies or tv shows that are comedy-based have a lot of filler. So it is no surprise to me that the rise of social media would make long-form comedy less appealing.
An odd occasion when I have strong disagreement with you. I’ve always thought willingness to offend vastly increases humor. Here’s a great example: https://youtu.be/ZDu0-L-pAes?si=dRAZQKhm-ez7B-75
Hysterical!!!