People protest outside the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York on Monday after CBS/Paramount announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The network says its decision was ‘purely financial.’RYAN MURPHY/Reuters
Here’s an example of the kind of callous cruelty that Stephen Colbert has been calling out during his 10 years as host of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which CBS cancelled last week: Friday morning, the President of the United States crowed on his social media, “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” despite the fact that 200 Late Show employees – 200 constituents Trump is supposed to care about – were reeling from the news that they’d lost their jobs.
Because CBS is ending not only Colbert’s tenure, but also the entire 32-year-old Late Show franchise, previously hosted by David Letterman (though it will run until May). The network claims the decision is “purely financial,” but that smells fishy. The show has never been a profit generator, but it is the top-rated late-night program and a jewel in the tiara of the so-called Tiffany Network, which earned that nickname for its spotless bona fides around journalistic freedom.
Until last week, that is, after Colbert openly criticized his network for paying Donald Trump US$16-million – he flatly called it “a big, fat bribe” – to settle a specious lawsuit against its flagship news show, 60 Minutes, at the very moment its parent company needs government approval for a corporate merger.
I find Trump’s gleefulness absolutely shameful, and I bet Colbert does, too, since speaking truth to shameful is what he’s been doing his entire television career, from The Daily Show through The Colbert Report to now. The right perceives him as a rabid Democrat, and though he certainly leans left, he’s more nuanced than that. What Stephen Tyrone Colbert, 61, husband of 32 years, father of three and a practising Catholic really is, is a humanist.
He embodies the very qualities that conservative Americans claim to admire: He’s a Christian and a Southerner, raised mainly in South Carolina by a homemaker mother and a doctor father. (His father and two of his brothers died in a plane crash when Colbert was 10.) His most fervent targets are waste, fraud and abuse. He abhors cruelty – he was delighted, for example, when Alex Jones was ordered to pay nearly a billion dollars to the families of the Sandy Hook massacre whom Jones had maligned. He didn’t hesitate to slam the boss who had helped him, Les Moonves, when Moonves was found guilty of sexual assault.
In other words, Colbert believes in accountability, and perhaps that’s what Trump, a person who feels accountability for nothing and no one, finds most infuriating about him.
When Colbert interviewed Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, he pressed Trump to disavow his false claims that Barack Obama hadn’t been born in the U.S. Trump declined. Like many comedians, Colbert pokes fun at Trump’s appearance, voice, grammatical errors and ego. But he levels his fiercest critiques at the lies Trump tells that hurt people: his baseless claims of voter fraud, his anti-vaccine and anti-science stances and his inhumane policies, including separating children from their parents, taking away people’s health care, narrowing the rights of women and queer people.
When Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Colbert admitted that he “cried with relief,” and then explained why: “For four years, we’ve looked on in horror as Trump tore down every norm in American life.” Those norms matter to Colbert, not on a political level, but a human one. So when Trump was re-elected in 2024, Colbert’s monologue began, “The first time Donald Trump was elected, he started as a joke and ended as a tragedy. This time he starts as a tragedy.”
Yet, when an assassin’s bullet narrowly missed Trump while he was still campaigning, Colbert said he felt “relief that Trump had lived. … Our job as American citizens is to reject violence and violent rhetoric…however hard we want to fight for our ideas.”
I recently heard the phrase “circle of concern” as a descriptor for who we care about, and I’m watching in despair as Americans’ circles of concern shrink to include only people like them – racially, politically, economically. When Colbert welcomes his audience every night, he makes a point of including everyone “in here, out there, all around the world, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.” And he means it. It’s not stunts or games that go viral after a Colbert show. It’s conversations that inspire connection. His circle of concern is wide.
A few examples. Against his network’s wishes, he showed a Rolling Stone cover of Kristen Stewart sticking her hand into her jockstrap, in order to defend the rights of women to express themselves sexually. He told Eminem he thought rappers swore too much. He traded obscure sci-fi authors with Paul Giamatti; show tunes with Audra Macdonald and Christine Baranski; deep-cut intel about the Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones franchises with anyone who would listen; and favourite poems with Michelle Williams, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Helen Mirren. In fact, he gave nearly two minutes of airtime to Mirren to read the end of Tennyson’s Ulysses, and visibly teared up by the end.
And what other talk show host could nudge guests into so many meaningful conversations about grief? On only his third episode, Colbert commiserated with then-U.S. vicepresident Joe Biden about perseverance born from necessity after personal tragedy. (Biden lost his first wife and their one-year-old daughter in a 1972 car accident.) He smiled kindly on Anderson Cooper 360 as Cooper choked up over his recently deceased mother, and explained gently that if you love life, you have to love all the parts of it, the joy and the pain. He jokingly asked Keanu Reeves what happens when we die and then let his face register surprise after Reeves’ unexpectedly beautiful answer: “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.”
And in 2021, Colbert listened attentively for two minutes as Andrew Garfield, grieving for his late mother, expressed his realization that grief is love – a segment that broke the internet and is widely shared among mourners to this day. Adding that he uses his art to sew up his wounds, Garfield told Colbert, “That’s what you do every night, you sew up our wounds.” Can you imagine another host to whom a guest would say that? I cannot.
Colbert is the nerdiest, the best-mannered, the most moral, literary and journalistic of emcees. I am mourning the coming loss of his nightly voice on broadcast television because I fear that the America we both still, somehow, love is in grave danger of trampling those qualities into dust.
