Stephen Colbert’s regime satire won’t be missed

In the depths of the Covid pandemic, the West’s cultural overlords teamed up with our newly authoritarian governments to cajole, browbeat and manipulate audiences into supporting the wholesale theft of their liberties, from lockdowns to mask and vaccine mandates.

From that terrible time, Stephen Colbert will forever remain, in my humble opinion, the worst offender. I felt something akin to genuine horror when I watched his ‘Vax Scene’ sketches while the US government was pushing for mandatory vaccinations. In one sketch, channeling his inner Caesar Flickerman, the evil talk-show host from The Hunger Games, Colbert grimaces and shimmies, while a row of people in syringe costumes and medical gloves awkwardly dance around the stage. It was probably one of the most dystopian, propagandistic pieces of television content ever created. If there is a hell for bad entertainment, Colbert will be going there.

So when news broke last week that CBS’s long-running The Late Show would be closing up shop, and that Colbert, its final host, would be moving on, my first thought was: good riddance.

In an exquisite example of corporate doublespeak, Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company, sang Colbert’s praises as it fired him, saying he was ‘irreplaceable’. So much so that he is being booted off the air altogether.

I’m old enough to remember when Stephen Colbert was actually funny. He burst on the scene as the pompous but goofy, old-style newsman type on The Daily Show, alongside Jon Stewart (also formerly of the funny community). Colbert took over The Late Show in 2015 from late-night icon David Letterman, who had sat at the desk for three decades – the longest-serving late-night host in television history.

With Colbert at the helm, The Late Show had nine seasons of being the top-rated late-night show on TV. That might sound impressive, but in truth it’s the modern-day equivalent of being the most popular violinist on the Titanic. Ratings are down across the mainstream-media ecosystem. And Colbert’s show was losing vast amounts of money. ‘This is purely a financial decision’, Paramount said of its axing. ‘It is not related to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.’

Predictably, the broken-brained libtards who still watch The Late Show have gone full conspiracy theorist, claiming Colbert has been axed not because his show is objectively poor and has lost huge amounts of money. No, it is supposedly because it ‘speaks truth to power’, or some such cope.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is among those hysterically claiming persecution. ‘CBS cancelled Colbert’s show just three days after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16million settlement with Donald Trump’, she wrote last week on X. ‘America deserves to know if his show was cancelled for political reasons.’ The settlement refers to the lawsuit Trump launched against Paramount over its favourable editing of a 60 Minutes interview with then presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Colbert referred to Paramount’s settlement as ‘a big fat bribe’.

Warren’s concerns about holding the powerful accountable would carry slightly more weight had Colbert ever chosen to hold Democrats to account. Instead, he danced with Senate caucus leader Chuck Schumer as the disastrous American withdrawal of Afghanistan was going on. He constantly fawned over the Obamas, once gushing that he had no jokes to make after playing a clip of the former first lady urging people to vote for Joe Biden. ‘My job is to have a joke for every time somebody says anything in public’, he said. ‘After watching Michelle Obama’s speech, I have never been more happy to fail at my job.’ He admitted publicly to crying tears of joy when Biden was elected in 2020 and said he lost faith in humanity after Trump’s massive victory in 2024.

When Colbert replaced Letterman in 2015, he was already known to be a more political comedian, but he did not wear his partisanship so blatantly. After Trump came along, everything changed. While jokes at Trump’s expense managed to land during the 2016 election, his unexpected victory that November seemed to break the brains of most American comedians, actors and journalists. Perhaps it was because they all mistook Trump for a political joke, but it turned out he was actually an internet-culture king – and he made them look like a joke. His wins in 2016 and 2024 made them the butt of the devastatingly revealing punchline. The fragile egos of the entire American cultural elite have not recovered to this day. Their mojo never returned.

The repercussions of this have manifested in falling viewer numbers, lost ad revenue and a general sense of decline throughout network television and cable – from news operations to sitcoms to late-night comedy. The ground shifted. TV comedians started to realise they were no longer influencing the broader culture – so they coped by toadying to, and carrying water for, the establishment and the state. The blatant bias was simply too much for half the country to tolerate, so they switched off.

It doesn’t matter how many public floggings are meted out to our progressive cultural and political overlords, in the form of disappearing ratings or lost elections. They will continue to cling to a past – now long gone – in which they are still the cool kids, speaking difficult truths to power. Stephen Colbert proves just how untrue and self-serving this self-mythologising can be.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here