Stephen Colbert helped ruin late-night comedy | Opinion

Picture two multimillionaires, supposedly grown men, blurting out vulgarities and throwing somebody else’s furniture off the top of a building in a major city. This might be cause for intervention from the police or perhaps counseling services. Instead, this was part of a going-away stunt by ousted CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert, along with his predecessor, David Letterman.

Colbert used to be a successful comic, but over time his attitude, ratings and career all spiraled downward, largely because of his political anger.

Colbert’s run on CBS ended on May 21. He spent much of his waning airtime berating his employer, congratulating himself and bringing on high-profile guests to flatter him. Those guests included former President Barack Obama and comedy hosts from rival networks, who spent much of their time psychoanalyzing their preferred target: President Donald Trump.

CBS announced last summer that Colbert’s show was getting canned. CBS attributed the cancellation to a financial decision. Various media outlets reported that Colbert’s show was very expensive to produce and losing upwards of $40 million per year. The host raked in a reported salary of $15 million annually. The cost-cutting was plausibly linked to CBS’ parent company Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media. It’s also worth noting that CBS’ Colbert cancellation came just days after he gave a blistering on-air critique of his network’s decision to settle a lawsuit with Trump that stemmed from reporting by “60 Minutes.”

Stephen Colbert fell from political comedy to partisan hostility

Whatever role politics may have played in Colbert’s cancellation, the direction of the show had been clear for years. Colbert and his producers moved away from the traditional late-night formula of trying to appeal to a broad audience. Instead, the show became increasingly political and more focused on viewers who already agreed with him.

That likely limited its appeal. Plenty of Americans enjoy political comedy, but Colbert increasingly built his show around hostility to Trump and the political right. In doing so, he may have overestimated how much of the country shared his worldview.

Comedians have often used politics as subject matter for jokes and commentary. But Colbert’s biting hostility to Trump and other right-leaning politicians showed an anger that couldn’t be hidden by labeling his outbursts as comedy.

A particularly vulgar comment about Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin during the collusion hysteria of 2017 might have ended Colbert’s CBS run right then, but CBS looked the other way.

Tuned-out audiences are turning off late-night TV – mostly

NBC legend Johnny Carson was one of a kind and broadcast in a much different media landscape, of course, but his “Tonight Show” routinely reached 15 million viewers per night. Colbert attracted roughly two and a half million. Even Fox News Channel’s goofy Greg Gutfeld gets more than 3.5 million viewers on a cable channel.

The late-night comedy tradition on broadcast television is certainly dying. (Even, Colbert has normally had better ratings than his competition from Jimmy Kimmel at ABC and Jimmy Fallon at NBC.)

"Gutfeld!" has benefited from the blatant political leanings of Colbert’s show, certainly, but also from the activist drives of the other late-night comedy shows. Studies from the Media Research Center find that 92% of jokes from the likes of Colbert, Kimmel and Fallon target conservative politicians or issues. The guest lists for interviews on those shows are also out of balance, with 99% of guests being liberal. That’s the prerogative of those network comedians, as allowed by the First Amendment. But it also explains the collapse of ratings for those late-night franchises.

Kimmel and Fallon did not broadcast new shows on the night of Colbert’s final broadcast, a sign of solidarity and protest for Colbert’s demise. They, like some others in the media world, look at Colbert as a free speech martyr who has lost his platform for speaking his mind.

But Colbert is not a victim of speech police, CBS or the Trump administration. He only had free speech on CBS as long as CBS allowed. It’s their channel. CBS decided that Colbert’s routine no longer made financial or cultural sense.

Ultimately, Colbert’s departure is no loss for American culture. To borrow an expression from sports, this is a case of addition by subtraction. The nation needs unifying voices more than it needs more polarization in comedy shows. Angry comedians are plentiful on social media for consumers who enjoy political outrage disguised as comedy. Colbert can join them. He just won’t have a network platform or a multimillion-dollar salary anymore.

Jeffrey M. McCall is a professor of communication at DePauw University.