The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is officially a late show, as in no longer with us. Its last Questionert has been answered; its final Rescue Dog rescued; its ultimate guest (Sir Paul McCartney) has left the building. Colbert filled his 80-minute finale with the same thoughtfulness, warmth and irony that has characterized his show over the last decade. In an earlier episode leading up to the end, his late night compadre Jimmy Kimmel expressed what many of us watching felt: “I’m waiting for angry Stephen to come out! I want you to go nuts.” But Colbert chose to leave the stage with grace and tenderness rather than rancor.
The ten months since CBS announced Colbert’s cancellation have served as an extended advance wake—for the show but also for an entertainment industry impervious to political pressure. One of The Late Show’s last guests, Bruce Springsteen, put it bluntly on Wednesday night, expressing solidarity with Colbert as “the first guy in America who’s lost his show because we’ve got a president who can’t take a joke.” And, Springsteen added, because new Paramount owner David Ellison and his father Larry “feel they need to kiss [Trump’s] ass to get what they want.”
Before Trump, generations of presidents grinned and bore their late night teasing—which sometimes even happened to their faces, as when Colbert brutally roasted George W. Bush about his deathly low approval rating and energy crisis (sound familiar?) at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. And it wasn’t just Republican leaders. In July 2024, Colbert joked of then-president Joe Biden’s debate performance, “I think Biden debated as well as Abraham Lincoln if you dug him up right now.” In fact, Democrats were the butt of most late night jokes when Barack Obama was in power, and Bill Clinton was Jay Leno’s favorite target.
But when Colbert first materialized on the late night scene, he wasn’t really a talk show host in the Carson/Letterman tradition. On The Daily Show, he had parodied a conservative pundit, raging Bill O’Reilly-style against all things liberal. In 2005, he spun off this performance art piece into The Colbert Report, where he coined the term “truthiness” in his very first episode. “Anybody who knows me knows I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books,” his character declared. “They’re elitist, constantly telling us what is or isn’t true or what did or didn’t happen.” His preference was to rely on his gut rather than knowledge.
Colbert had put his finger on the emerging embrace of alternative truths and conspiracy theories, a pick-your-facts hostility to experts and professionals of every kind. Not for nothing did Trump name his social media network Truth Social, and called those posts “Truths.” Late last year, after CBS announced The Late Show’s cancellation, Trump continued to unleash “Truths” on Colbert. After taunting him about “his nonexistent ratings” (Late Show was actually the most-watched show in its time slot), the president continued: “Stephen is running on hatred and fumes ~ A dead man walking! CBS should, ‘put him to sleep,’ NOW, it is the humanitarian thing to do!”