The Stephen Colbert of it all
With love from a former Late Night staffer who is very pissed off right now
I love comedy. I have my whole life. Purely as someone who still watches late night monologues with the fervor most people my age devote to Love Island, I’m devastated that we will be losing one of our most honest, hilarious, and kind voices.
Stephen Colbert is whip smart, uniquely empathetic, and a consistently brave thorn in the side of politicians who seek to use their power to harm us. For some reason, as I write, the phrase “speak softly and carry a big stick”—which is most associated with Teddy Roosevelt and early 20th century American foreign policy—comes to mind. Colbert is affable, patient, and genuinely interested in communicating with guests and audiences. But as a devout Catholic, he can also recite scripture in the face of anyone who seeks to twist its meaning. He has a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of history, literature, and politics and knows when and how to use it. He is genuinely curious about the world, not for show but to better take it all in and to share it with us. He speaks softly and carries a big stick. The loss of his voice is massive.
But of course, I have more to say than just that.
For at least a decade now, lame, unfunny, self-described “comedians” have lamented what they described as the end of comedy. “You can’t say anything anymore,” they’d whine, mic in hand, on a stage in front of hundreds of people, perhaps even whilst recording a Netflix special for which they were being paid half a million dollars.
Of course, what they really meant was that accountability was kind of sort of starting to matter—that some audiences were less willing to tolerate their sexism/racism/misogyny/general shittiness. Those very same podcast douchebags with millions of listeners helped elevate Donald Trump, whom you may recall was elected President of the United States (the first time) a month after a tape came out where he bragged about assaulting women. “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”
I was lucky enough to be a footage researcher at Late Night with Seth Meyers starting in January 2016. Lucky because it was a really fucking cool job on a show hosted by a comedian I’d admired my whole life who was awesome to his staff. Less lucky because my job specifically entailed listening to every “bing bing bong” and “look at my African American” over and over again in a dark edit room until the words were seared into my brain forever. “When you’re a star, they let you do it” was no exception.
Basically, it was my job to listen to the news and pull the best soundbites out. Good training for my life today. Like most things Trump, it was funny until it wasn’t. Until you realized every not-at-all veiled threat he made against the people who made fun of him was how he really felt. But at least they would stay on the air, every night, to keep calling him out to millions of people. There was nothing Trump could do about that. Right?
Not to mention: Any late night host worth their salt doesn’t just reserve their ire for the creep-in-chief. Colbert and his late night compatriots also call out the Democrats when they need to be called out—which these days is a lot.
I was at Late Night through the first year of the first Trump Administration. Late night shows are a massive operation, which you wouldn’t necessarily guess because all we see on tv is one guy behind a desk. But there are hundreds of employees, from hair and makeup to stage managers to security to accountants to editors to graphics designers to assistants to talent bookers to researchers and of course, writers. More often than not in that first year, Donald Trump would do something insane around 4 pm, so we’d have to scrap the planned “A Closer Look” segment and get a whole new one done by recording time at 7:30. Everyone always rose to the occasion.
All this to say, I understand what it takes to get a show like that on the air every night, having been just one tiny piece of a gigantic machine that became so much more important when our government started lying to us about everything as dumb as crowd sizes and as serious as stolen elections. And unsurprisingly, Colbert made sure to make his announcement about the whole machine. All 200 people he employs.
(Btw, outside of shitty election results, this monologue is one of the first times he has seemed to me sincerely shaken. I really do believe he did not see this coming.)
Having worked in both cable news and late night comedy, I would say that they are at least equally important. And in moments like this—wherein a fascist pants-shitter is gleefully leading us into global doom—I’d say comedy is even more important. Because while journalists try to make a big show of being “unbiased” and open to sharing all perspectives no matter how idiotic or offensive, they end up going on camera and sounding like this—which I recorded in 2020, btw.
But comedians call out the bullshit. They hold a mirror up to society, say “what the fuck?” and make us laugh—and we walk away knowing more than we did before they started. Comedy is disarming; it’s honest, even when the truth is scary. Late night comedy has long served this purpose of speaking truth to power with a smile. And no one does it better than Stephen Colbert. Presidents have never necessarily liked it, but they knew it was part of the deal. Sort of like people who drive Cybertrucks—you gotta know that I’m going to flip you off in traffic.
It’s not hyperbole to say that without comedians like Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert, my life would be completely different right now. I’d probably be a lawyer—and maybe in some ways the stability of that would have been a comfort for my parents—but the truth is that watching late night comedy, learning how the rhythm of a joke works or how to punch something up, scratched an itch in my brain like nothing else had. Before I left Late Night to work at CNN, I got a joke on the show. My cue cards and $100 check still hang in my living room.
These guys are the people who taught me how to think about the world—how to make sense of it while being funny, to ease the pain. This little newsletter that I am working hard to get off the ground exists because of them. Because they made the world just a bit easier to live in with their devotion to both the truth and to giggles.
And I’m not naive. I know the business of late night has changed over the past decade, as has the entire media landscape. Everything is on YouTube and 12 seconds now, which sucks for those of us trying to make and consume longer-form content.
But I’m also not a dumbass. Paramount is calling the cancellation of the Peabody-winning highest rated late night show a “financial decision” just days after Colbert criticized them for the “big fat bribe” they had just offered the Trump Administration to the tune of $16 million, all in exchange for their Skydance merger going through. Jon Stewart, whose Daily Show is also on a Paramount-owned network, openly shared the same criticism. (Not to mention the close ties that Skydance owner David Ellison has with Trump or the fact that he’s apparently musing about buying The Free Press amid all this supposed financial insecurity.)
I also know that losing a comedy show amid all the other losses our country is facing may have some saying “okay, time to move on.” And sure, it’s mostly white guys in suits (or in Seth’s case these days, tasteful sweaters), but this is part and parcel of a much larger trend happening in legacy media. And it is so, so incredibly dangerous. Free speech is truly the difference between a democratic society and a fascist one. And we’re rapidly losing ours.
Disney/ABC, another former employer of mine, settled with Trump for $15 million last year to make a defamation lawsuit go away. They fired longtime correspondent Terry Moran for calling Trump and Stephen Miller “world class haters,” because apparently powerful losers trying to deport millions on the basis of race is less problematic than calling it what it is. The Washington Post, the paper that literally uncovered Watergate, said in February via their current owner Jeff Bezos that their opinion pages would now be devoted to “personal liberties and free markets.” CNN pays Confederacy Ken aka Scott Jennings to come on the air every night and pontificate about nonsense, they claim in the name of ideological balance? Now the network of Edward R. Murrow has taken away the platform of its most truthful and effective communicator, while PBS and NPR have had their federal funding slashed. It’s a precarious moment for us all, to say the least. And from the “you can’t say anything anymore” dudes? Nary a peep.
Everything I’ve ever heard about Stephen Colbert is that he is a mensch in every sense of the word. He and his staff deserve better than this ending, and I truly hope that the upcoming Paramount-Skydance marriage suffers for their leaders’ cowardly behavior. I hope those responsible are held accountable and I thank the Writers Guild of America for standing up for what’s right. I hope we find ways to keep pushing art and knowledge and humor in the face of those who seek to take it from us.
But for now, thank you for everything, Mr. Stephen. We love you.
💯 💯 💯
We should all be terrified, and pissed off.