Let’s face it. In the decade-long war between television comedy and the American president, Donald Trump is winning. Bigly. Many late-night comics have tried to find ratings at Trump’s expense, and few have survived. Samantha Bee, Michelle Wolf, and Jordan Klepper all tried their hand at resistance comedy, only to be canceled.
The latest casualty is one of the pioneers of the genre, the once-funny and now-unwatchable Stephen Colbert. Yes, the host who literally offered a champagne toast on-air to Joe Biden after his 2020 victory, the guy who starred in a painful-to-watch musical sketch about the “vax-scene” with dancers dressed as hypodermic needles, will be leaving the airwaves next May. Will we ever laugh again?
There are a few reasons why mocking Trump has been such a challenge for the late-night talkers. But the biggest one is that comedy—like so many aspects of American life in the Trump era—became hopelessly politicized.
Since Trump’s election, many of the country’s greatest comic minds have curdled into scolds. Remember back in 2016, we were told that Trump’s ascendance was an extinction-level event. SNL’s cold open after Trump won that year featured only a somber Kate McKinnon at the piano singing Leonard Cohen’s melancholy dirge, “Hallelujah.”
One had to pick a side. And if you were in a field like television comedy, choosing Trump was a social death sentence. So the vast majority of televised comedy, which once mocked both political parties, became mono-focused on the mean orange man. Monologues became polemics. In the case of Colbert, it was hard to tell the difference between his show and any of the chat shows on MSNBC.
