I Preferred The Fake Stephen Colbert to the Real One

 

I think I watched every episode of The Colbert Report between the spring of 2006 and when it came to an end in the spring of 2014. And I also think I laughed hysterical through every moment of it, from The Word to Cheating Death to Yahweh or No Way, there was no moment that I didn't find hysterical or coming from a place of comedic truth. I had never seen nor ever would an episode of Bill O'Reilly but I didn't need to in order to get what Colbert was satirizing on his show.

And a big part of the reason the show was so hysterically funny was because even though Colbert was satirizing right-wing media he was still following the cardinal rule of late-night comedy: every public figure is subject to being made fun of. He did so with W when he was in power, went after McCain and Obama with the same fervor, satirized Hilary and Mitt Romney, went after everybody in politics with the same satiric edge. And just as importantly he gave both sides an audience to make fun of them equally.

One bit of Colbert was 'Better Know a District' where he would interview members of Congress and talk to them with the same behavior. He did so with Democrats and Republicans though after a while leadership of the GOP started limited access to him. He also interviewed lobbyists, campaign strategists for both Republicans and Democrats, talked to Republican justices and Democratic ones and had both Republican and Democratic candidates for President on his show. Both Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich appeared on his show multiple times and he attempted to give both 'The Colbert bump'.

In this Colbert was following in the footsteps of his mentor Jon Stewart, where he had been a correspondent on The Daily Show from 1999 to 2005. Stewart essentially spent his first tenure of The Daily Show making fun of both political parties and all parts of cable news with the dark satiric lens it deserved. He saved his harshest rhetoric for Fox News to be sure but he made it very clear that in their own ways CNN and MSNBC were just as guilty of the roles they played in destroying the political landscape. He satirized Republicans as fundamentally corrupt and purely hypocritical – but just as importantly he made it clear Democrats great flaw was their incompetence and their frequently self-congratulatory behavior when it came to their political idols. Stewart, like Colbert, was a liberal in his politics but he was not blind to the flaws in his own party and never hesitating to call them on their bullshit.

Similarly he was just as willing to give Republicans an audience even after he spent weeks or months making fun of them. The most famous example I remember was when The Daily Show spent nearly a year satirizing the new head of the RNC Michael Steele. They satirized his behavior by having a Muppet version of him come on the show to be the real Michael Steele and lampooned the Muppet Steele until he was forced to resign. Then not long after Steele agreed to be interviewed by Stewart and before he came out, the Muppet version of Steele came out first. Steele responded to it in good humor.

Colbert and Stewart understood the rules of late-night comedy during that period simply: everyone in power is given a chance to be an idiot and you are entitled to make fun of that. I say that period but those had been the rules of late night since it began. It's only in the last decade its changed forever.

 

I was reminded of this when I saw a headline by the Post where they took a dark pleasure in Colbert's cancellation. Normally I would be inclined to view this as just gloating and for good reason: Fox News has been the target of late night for nearly twenty years and Colbert has been doing so since 2005 at least. It was the subhead of the headline that attracted me:

"Since 2022 Colbert has had 174 Democrats as guests and only one Republican."

Now I've never considered the New York Post the bastion of integrity or fact checking. But the reason I'm inclined to give to take it seriously is I'm actually shocked Colbert has had one Republican in the last three and a half years. Because that is in large part one of the reasons I was so disappointed by The Late Show when Colbert took over. Colbert knew what had worked for him when he was on Comedy Central and he knew what the rules had been better than anyone who was given a late night job during the period the medium was in transition. So while I might be willing to give Fallon or Meyers or Trevor Noah the benefit of the doubt I can't give it to Colbert.

He knew what the rules were better than anyone. And he knew by them in 2021 it was his job to start making fun of the Biden administration and the Democrats. It's not like there was a shortage of material. Long before we knew the truth of Biden's mental condition, both he and his administration were plagued by the same kinds of problems Trump had dealt with. Indeed Biden's popularity throughout his entire administration was never much better than Trump's. For that matter, he always had a poorer rating among Democrats then Trump ever did with Republicans, spending most of the first three years of his term at not much higher than 40 percent. Only in comparison to Trump did he fare better – and not by much.

Nor were the Democrats much better. The administration had few legislative accomplishments to call its own and Pelosi and Schumer were no better heads of their caucus than the Republicans. It's worth noting during this period the complaints about the 'geritocracy' became manifest and even if you excluded Biden, this could apply to the leadership of the Democrats across the board.

All of these were things Colbert could and should have asked the Democrats he invited on his show but as far as I saw he only brought them on to ask how things were dealing with the Republicans. Like every other late night talk show host, his material acted as if Trump and the GOP were still in power and controlled both houses of Congress which was never true at any point during Biden's Presidency. It wasn't just like they treated them with kid gloves; by comparison MSNBC and progressive newsletters were treating them like Tucker Carlson. The most negative thing I heard any late night show say about the Democrats was "for all their flaws, they're trying to govern."

Now I have no doubt the progressives are going to argue that Colbert and his colleagues were doing their moral good by telling their audiences the existential threat Trump and the GOP were to America and that they should never come near power again. Even if I allow that as a moral good, I'd say there's a time and place for everything. Late night's job was to make me laugh. I fail to see how telling me about how the Dominion voting machine suit revealed the truth of Fox News's attitude towards Trump was supposed to fill that void.

But perhaps the biggest sign of the blind spot when it came to Democrats during this period didn't involve the White House but something that was happening in so many late night's hosts backyard. I'm talking about how during 2021 Andrew Cuomo's governorship was starting to come undone and that by the end of the year, he would be forced to resign.

To put it simply this is the kind of story that a decade earlier late night would have feasted on for weeks. In fact during Obama's first term there were two such stories. Eliot Spitzer being forced to resign as Governor of New York for soliciting prostitutes and more on point, Anthony Weiner being caught in a sexting scandal and being forced to resign from Congress in 2011. In both cases Stewart, Colbert and everyone on late night spent a lot of time tearing them apart and again when they attempted comebacks in 2013.

And when it comes to being impartial Jon Stewart and Anthony Weiner had been roommates in college. When Stewart first heard the story, a part of him genuinely didn't want to do anything even though he admitted the punchline was too good. But he got over it pretty quickly and started to mock him (even literally shedding blood for his art) And when Weiner attempted to run for mayor in 2013 – and Stewart was out of the country during the summer – he mentioned to John Oliver in a virtual segment how much he wished he was there to mock him. It was Oliver who got to use everything involving Carlos Danger and Stewart was only there for the last few weeks.

Now setting aside the issues of sexual harassment charges against Cuomo the material practically wrote itself. Among the charges was that Cuomo has misappropriated federal funds reserved for Covid to write a memoir about beating it when it still hadn't happened in New York state. And it's not like Andrew Cuomo had ever been admired or even respected in New York even among those liberals such as Stewart or anyone else. But during 2021, every late night host from Colbert to Meyers to Noah, basically spent all their time focusing on Trump and the Republicans. This was the thing that should have at least made for one joke segment on A Closer Look on Seth Meyers. The only person who dealt with it was John Oliver and to be clear, he did so mainly because he never liked Cuomo – or indeed any Democrats – in the first place.

Now I have to tell you I don't know if The Late Show or indeed any late night comedians have dealt with the New York City mayor's race in any capacity during the last several months. There's certainly a lot of material in that race, among them the fact that two of the candidates Cuomo and Eric Adams, have both been the subject of Justice Department investigations. And there's still several months left before the election: maybe late night will deal with it. But the realist in me tends to doubt it and not just because everyone in late night is focusing their outrage on the fact of Colbert's cancellation and the fact that they believe Trump is the source of all of it.

No it's because Stephen Colbert has had 174 Democrats on his show in three years and their attitude toward Colbert has basically become that of the same way Trump once famous described Putin. He says nice things about them; they say nice things about him. Another comedian – the Colbert on the Report for one,  might say something like: "The Democrats have found a sure strategy to win back rural America in the midterms: Spend time and energy focused on why a white New York millionaire lost his job!" This is another one of those things that cries out for satire but as we all know – and the Late Show Colbert knows it in particular – it's only funny if it happens to Republicans.

All of this is the kind of thing that deserves to be satirized and made fun of for weeks if not months on end. That the Democrats and progressives have now been mobilizing and calling Colbert's cancellation as bad, if not worse, then everything else that the Republicans are actually doing. Seriously I've received a dozen emails from left-leaning websites demanding a Congressional investigation into Colbert's cancellation in the past week – they've found a way to turn this decision by CBS into a Democratic fundraising technique. That's the kind of thing the Colbert Report would have seen a lot of humor in as well as the fact the left is taking it with their usual humorless intensity. Maybe that's the real reason that late night doesn't make as much fun of Democrats and progressives. They don't like being fun of any more than the right does, and they're just as terrified of isolating the base.