Stephen Colbert, Funny As F**k Freedom Fighter

I don’t know if Stephen Colbert was more funny or acidic on his Late Show in the week since he revealed that CBS was canceling him, but he was damn good. A sampler:

After Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother, said that Jeffrey broke off his friendship with Trump “when he realized that Trump was a crook,” Colbert said “That’s extraordinary! Jeffrey Epstein breaking it off with you because you’re a crook is like walking into an intervention organized by Rudy Giuliani!"

Reacting to clips from Trump’s sleazy revelations about his own sleazy sex life on the Howard Stern show in 2006, Colbert said, “It all makes it so hard to accept Trump’s Epstein denials. I mean, it would be easier to accept Sir Mix-A-Lot saying ‘I never visited Big Butt Island!’”

Among his many jokes about his show’s cancellation he said, “Don’t worry. This beautiful theater will live on as the historic Ed Sullivan Self Storage” where you can “put your old records where the Beatles performed!”

These are just the jokes that (almost) translate to the page. Much of Colbert’s funniest stuff in his monologues comes from his subtle physical humor, his impromptu asides, and the inside jokes he builds up over weeks with his audience (“Is Potato”).

The context here of course is that, outrageously, CBS’s parent company capitulated to Trump’s frivolous lawsuit over edits to a Kamala Harris interview during the election season. At any other point in my lifetime (roughly the lifetime of 60 Minutes as it happens), CBS would have easily shut such nonsense down before a judge. But now, the century-old network is owned by Paramount Global, soon to be Paramount Skydance after a merger that required US government approval. To curry favor with the administration, Paramount Chairwoman Shari Redstone meddled with the CBS news operation and acceded to a $16 million settlement with Trump. Days later the deal got its green light from his FCC.

For much of the past 20 years, Shari Redstone’s chief business concern was running a film exhibition company called National Amusements, which is apparently how she regards the ravaging of the Constitution of the United States, as long as she gets her massive merger payday. On his show after this story played out, Colbert said in his monologue that “I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles. It’s Big Fat Bribe.”

Days after that, the network pulled the plug on The Late Show, which has been on the air since 1993. It said this was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night” and “is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” While this isn’t utterly phony (the late night TV business is in the toilet), that word ‘purely’ is hauling a lot of bullshit up the mountain. Whether or not Paramount made a quiet deal to vanish troublesome Trump critics (seems likely to me), the network did accept a government-imposed ombudsman in its editorial ranks to ferret out “bias.” Another massive media conglomerate is complying with the regime, and I expect more sacrifices of integrity and autonomy to come.

But I want to make this about Stephen Colbert himself, because I love and appreciate him. As a comic and commentator, he deserves a place in American history alongside Mark Twain, Will Rogers and George Carlin. He’s not just funny. He’s important funny. Since his days as a correspondent on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Colbert stood out to me as especially authentic and skilled at his art form. I loved his first big solo show, The Colbert Report, where he played a parody of conservative TV outrage merchants like Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. It was one of the great meta-media satires of all time, and it remained funny and cutting over nine years, between 2005 and 2014. Remember that in that show, the faux journalist pledged that while "Anyone can read the news to you," I will "feel the news…at you". He stood for the concept of “truthiness,” the currency of 21st century pundit-based political media, where things don’t have to be factual if they feel good enough to be true.

Even Colbert himself noted that the in-character satire format probably had a shelf life, so we were both delighted when he was announced as the replacement for David Letterman, a surreal comedian who dominated my entertainment mindscape from my college years on. While Letterman was goofy and loose and off-kilter, Colbert has been a more disciplined and effective host all around I think. At least he’s been more in tune with my sensibility in middle age. He’s less cynical and jaded, always leavening the heaviness of the news with examples of humanity and kindness.

Mostly of course, he does jokes. Clever jokes, dumb jokes, Dad jokes, sublime jokes, slow burn jokes, risqué jokes, and - indispensably - political jokes about the biggest joke of a public figure we’ve known in our lifetimes. And through it all, he’s never come across as anything but a serious person oriented by a fully functioning moral compass. He doesn’t just call out hypocrisy or venality, he parses it and gets to the heart of it, sometimes at a spiritual level. He grasps how things are going wrong in the big picture and shares it with us in manageable doses. His monologues after national tragedies have been remarkably comforting and empathetic. And on such nights, his ability to segue gracefully from counselor to comedian is like nothing I’ve ever seen. He lets himself get outraged and a little crass, but he never punches down or plays to the lowest common denominator.

Please watch Colbert’s monologue from the evening of Jan. 6, 2021 (when he was managing but struggling to do his show from home studio Covid quarantine without a live audience). It was one of the great addresses to the nation in modern history - more effective and meaningful than just about anything I ever saw from Obama or Biden frankly. He didn’t merely berate Republicans and tear the mask off the MAGA movement. He told a story about the decimation of shared reality in America and about the cynical exploitation of vulnerable Americans by networks like FOX News and the media apparatus around the GOP. He did this live, with patriotic adrenaline surging through him. This monologue made me cry that night, or maybe I mean helped me cry when I needed to. It was brave and necessary and still, goddamn it, funny.

We have a lot in common, Colbert and myself. We’re both intellectually curious white guys from the Carolinas and both children of the 1960s and 70s, the time when TV started its slide from golly-gee edu-tainment to a more cynical, compartmentalized agent of capitalism. He was born in Washington, DC in 1964 and grew up in a suburb of Charleston, SC. I was born in Washington, DC in 1966 and grew up in the mid-sized city of Durham, NC. We attended Northwestern University in Chicago at the same time in the 1980s, though I didn’t hear of him until The Daily Show era. And in both his on-camera personae and through the personal side I’ve seen on his occasional offstage interviews, I recognize him, I know him. I aspire to be as wise and magnanimous and thoughtful as he is. His character - his real character - has never disappointed me, and that’s extraordinary in modern, big money, celebrity media.

Since the cancellation was announced (Colbert is supposed to have until next May when his contract runs out), Trump and his supporters have crowed with glee, tagging Colbert as a leftist. As if. He’s an intellectual normie, a guy who asks fair questions and who often doesn’t like what this political era throws back at us as answers. Colbert is a practicing Catholic, a proud, loving husband to his wife of 32 years, Evie, and father of three children. No doubt, he’s liberal, but as with myself, it’s traditional liberalism rooted in human rights, equal protection, good government, and freedom. He triggers Republicans so hard not because he’s a progressive firebrand who bashes capitalism, but because he’s smart, inclusive, and incisive, and they know it. He holds the mirror. They just can’t deal with it.

I’m quite sure that if I asked Colbert whether he loves lampooning Trump in 2025, he’d say no way. Likewise, I take no pleasure that Trump’s his chief foil in 2025, but I see why he has to be. Because Trump is the test of our time. Silence is not an option. Ridicule and humor is both an opportunity and an obligation when an autocrat tries to take over a free people. After Biden won in 2020, Colbert retired his Trump impression for a good while, only to turn it back on when it was clear that this disgraced criminal was going to run again. I wish to god that he’d been able to retire the impression forever and that he was making caustic jokes nightly about the Harris administration, which I assure you he would do.

At a time when so many prominent people have let us down and toed the regime’s new, un-American lines, Colbert has been stalwart. I realize that one of the reasons I’ve been devoted to his monologues (and of course “Meanwhile”) since he joined the Late Show is that it’s inspiring to watch a truly free American genius at work. I’m confident he’ll find a powerful new platform for his vital commentary, and I’ll be there for it.