Stephen Colbert kills The Late Show

“When you die at the palace, you really die at the palace,” laments Comicus, the ancient Roman “stand-up philosopher” played by Mel Brooks in his iconic, if not exactly well received, History of the World, Part I (1981). Forced to improvise a comedy routine for Dom DeLuise’s Emperor Nero, Comicus repeatedly puts his foot squarely in his mouth, insulting the capricious ruler for his corruption and weight. An enraged Nero sentences him to death, setting up a madcap escape sequence.

Brooks’s character survives to tell mostly bad jokes in two more period skits, but there was no escape this week for corporate liberal comedy icon Stephen Colbert, host of CBS’s The Late Show, the 32-year old “live on tape” late-night comedy franchise he took over from the vastly more talented David Letterman in 2015. On Monday, Colbert unwisely called a $16 million payment by Paramount, CBS’s parent company, to settle legal claims brought by President Donald J. Trump a “big fat bribe.”

Trump’s legal claims against Paramount arose from the selective editing of 60 Minutes’s 2024 election campaign interview with Kamala Harris to make her appear smarter and more articulate than she really is. This was not Trump’s first legal triumph over biased legacy media. In December, ABC News expressed “regret” and agreed to contribute an identical amount to Trump’s future presidential library and legal fees to settle a defamation claim after commentator George Stephanopoulos falsely stated in a March 2024 interview that Trump had been found “liable for rape.”

Within 48 hours of Colbert’s jibe, network bosses who may have taken offense at the establishment comic’s mockery of their alleged corruption and corpulence informed him that The Late Show was cancelled and will end next May, upon the expiration of his contract. A stressed out Colbert, who has less than a year of his reported $15 million annual compensation left, opened his Thursday evening taping with the bad news, commiserating with his disappointed live audience before indulging in performative platitudes to express how “grateful” he is to the “great partners” who just fired him.

CBS and Paramount are also trying to take the high road. A group of their executives, including CBS’s appositely named president George Cheeks, who is also Paramount’s co-chief executive, announced that their decision “is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount” and touted “our admiration, affection and respect for the talents of Stephen Colbert” – feelings radiating a positivity so irresistible that they canceled his show. Instead, the media bosses say Colbert’s cancelation was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night [programming],” one they claim to have found “agonizing” and “difficult.”

It must have been. In the sea of mediocrity and partisan bias that has passed for late-night network television comedy in recent years, Colbert has stood out, consistently gleaning the highest ratings among talentless peers even as CBS’s ratings have slumped to all-time lows. Granted, the network late-night milieu is a shadow of its former self and deliberately limits its appeal by only addressing one side of America’s political divide and eschewing a wealth of material that might offend that group. Colbert himself has long since abandoned the smarmy satirical shtick that once made him stand out as something of a critical thinker. In the Age of Trump, he became the witless corporate guy he once played, a parody of himself who allowed his show to degenerate into a predictable regurgitation of stale leftist talking points delivered to an audience of likeminded liberals who swallow them and applaud on command, like trained seals.

Still, it takes a lot to fire your top performer. “Other matters happening at Paramount” include not just its sensitive legal settlement with Trump, but the network’s reputation for political bias, a national environment where a record 69 percent of Americans express little or no trust in the mainstream media and ongoing negotiations to merge Paramount with Skydance Media, a deal that Trump has publicly praised. Since the merger would involve transferring CBS’s broadcast licenses to the new company, it will have to be approved by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission. The profits – both corporate and personal – are almost certainly worth more than the fate of a washed-up clown who outlived his usefulness to the media establishment the second he started pointing out their foibles. The Late Show may be over, but their hypocrisy, and Colbert’s, will live on.