Who does Colbert think he’s kidding?

David Letterman, who by now has retreated into full comedy-hermit mode, posted a bunch of old Late Show clips on his YouTube page on Monday, where he continually and brutally spit-roasted CBS. In honor of CBS losing NFL coverage to FOX in 1994 (and selling off several affiliates in the bargain), he ran a “Top Ten List” of “New CBS Slogans,” including “you can’t spell ‘Bumbling Executives without C-B-S!’ and ‘If you bring your talk show here, we’ll sell all your stations!’” As a reward for that long-ago roasting, CBS said nothing in response and kept Letterman’s highly profitable show on the air for more than two decades.

What Letterman didn’t do, and what he never did, was tell the sitting president of the United States to “Go Fuck Yourself,” as Stephen Colbert witlessly did on the now-dying Late Show Monday night, though at one point during his run Letterman did call George W. Bush an “asswipe,” the beginning of his end as a pure comedian. Colbert’s show also featured a “solidarity” video, a lame parody of the Coldplay-concert-affair meme, that featured silent cameos from his fellow late-night hosts Seth Myers, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Jimmy Fallon and other allies, including Weird Al Yankovic and Lin-Manuel Miranda. It was a limp bleat, like a bunch of elected high-school officers rallying around themselves when they figure out that most of the student body actually hates them. 

There’s a long history of comedians ruthlessly mocking the corporations that own their shows. 30 Rock spent its entire run mercilessly crapping on NBC and its parent company, “Kabletown.” Johnny Carson once joked that his NBC boss met him at the airport “just before he put my shackles back on.” When Jay Leno realized his Tonight Show days were numbered, he deployed this zinger: “T-Mobile announced they’re doing away with contracts. Apparently they got the idea from NBC.” In 1986, after GE bought NBC, Letterman visited the GE building in New York with a fruit basket, saying, “what I’m really trying to get at here is, am I going to have a job?” Security escorted him out with a bullhorn. Letterman kept the NBC job until he left for CBS. 

Contrast that to Jon Stewart’s Daily Show monologue Monday night, in which he delivered the Bluesky-quality rant: “If you believe, as corporations or as networks, you can make yourselves so innocuous, that you can serve a gruel so flavorless that you will never again be on the boy king’s radar, why will anyone watch you, and you are fucking wrong.” He then danced in front of a gospel choir, chanting “Go and fuck yourself, Go and fuck yourself!”

That tantrum completely misreads the situation. The CBS–Paramount deal may be subject to the whims of the “boy king.” But network and cable television no longer matter like they did. Far more people watch online video and listen to podcasts for their comedy fixes than tune in to late-night talk shows. One could easily argue that the best late-night hosts, John Mulaney and Adam Friedland, aren’t really on late night at all, but Netflix and YouTube, respectively. Bill Maher, who gets to have dinner with the President, is on HBO Max. Conan O’Brien hosted the Oscars, has a great podcast, and an HBO travel show as dessert. Craig Ferguson, who, besides Conan, was the last truly great network talk-show host, was last seen on TV hosting a bad reality show called The Hustler, and has a podcast called Joy. 

Joe Rogan boasts countless millions of listeners. Shane Gillis just hosted the ESPYs. Nate Bargatze will host the Emmys. Taylor Tomlinson, the youngest comedian ever to get a late-night network talk show, left the gig because touring was more fun and profitable, and probably less stressful. There are still comedians, young and older, with plenty of edge, and plenty of audience. 

Stewart and Colbert shouldn’t kid themselves, because they’re not capable of kidding themselves much anymore. When they first rose to prominence, the nation needed them. They helped deflate the pompous, humorless neoconservative political atmosphere that was suffocating the country in the first decade of the 2000s. When Barack Obama came to power, suddenly the hunter became the hunted. Eventually, they ran afoul of Donald Trump, the First Comedian. 

Even earlier this week, as the world of mainstream comedy praised Colbert to the skies and damned Trump all to hell, Trump announced that he’d settled a $16 million defamation lawsuit against Paramount and 60 Minutes, in which he claimed they’d selectively edited an interview with Kamala Harris. On his show last week, Colbert called the money “a big fat bribe.” The timing is really suspicious. 

But Trump was crowing all day about “another in a long line of VICTORIES over the Fake News Media, who we are holding to account for their widespread fraud and deceit.” We can only assume it’ll be smooth sailing for the Skydance–Paramount deal going forward. 

Meanwhile, the Shitposter-In-Chief just kept piling on. “The word is,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone. These are people with absolutely NO TALENT, who were paid Millions of Dollars for, in all cases, destroying what used to be GREAT Television. It’s really good to see them go, and I hope I played a major part in it!”

You certainly did, sir. And I expect we’ll be hearing “fuck you, Mr. President” a lot on whatever remains of late-night network TV in the months to come.