Stephen Colbert’s Late Show cancelled, will end May 2026
When your show is losing $40 to $50 million a year, is there really any need to look for other reasons you got cancelled? Do we need to bring in politics? Isn’t a $40 million loss pretty definitive?
Some claim that CBS’s settlement with Trump coercively inspired the network’s action against the late night Lefty, but then we find out that the cancellation decision seems to have preceded CBS’s settlement with Trump, and also preceded Colbert’s bad-mouthing of the network. (Which you might otherwise suppose could have brought on Colbert’s troubles.) Maybe CBS had always been secretly Right Wing? But they had been OK with Colbert and his politics for the previous ten years. Or maybe late night talk shows (according to some, anyway) are a dying form — it’s probably significant that Colbert is not being replaced; the show itself is going away.
So, probably no need to bring in politics. Comedian Rob Schneider, after a few jokes about Russia colluding in Colbert’s cancellation, and telling us a judge ruled that the network has no right to fire him, dissects it this way:
The late night audience, seen as a pie (a pizza pie, Schneider tells us) can only be divided so many ways. Colbert, by his ideology, has preemptively excluded half of the pie, half of his potential audience — the half that voted for Trump. This leaves the remaining half to be divided among the entire cadre of late-nighters (Schneider puts that cadre at three: Colbert, Kimmel and Fallon). Colbert’s possible piece of the pie, then, is already narrowed down. These other talk show hosts are all Wokies too, leaving Stephen little in the way of original ideas to offer in competition with them. So maybe the pie had just become too small to sustain Colbert?
But … let’s say, just hypothetically, that the cancellation was based on politics. Any complaint by Colbert on those grounds has to be ironic. Colbert chose to make himself all about politics. He chose to make his show all about politics. Now, when politics turns around and bites him on the ass, he’s going to whine?
It’s a live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword kind of thing: live by politics, get cancelled by politics. You chose this road, Steve.
Ain O’Malley
July 26, 2025
P.S.— Colbert says he will “take off the gloves” for the final ten months or so of his show Some of his fellow travelers have claimed to find this prospect exciting. Since Colbert never seemed to be holding back before, it’s not clear what taking off the gloves would look like — the threat seems more like empty bluster. I guess viewers will find out.
The Right errs in lambasting Colbert as "not funny."
He's not funny *to us*. But to his audience, he most certainly is.
I'll admit, if I turn off my own politics filter, some of his Trump/conservative-insult-humor is _clever_.
But to me, on a visceral level it cannot be anything but obnoxious.
Colbert and his dancing hypodermics. Hahahahaha.
Not.
One is tempted to label this as a case of Colbert/left-wingers getting a dose of just desserts.
How do *they* like cancel culture?
But that also is not really accurate.
Trump is the leader of a counter-revolution. We/Trump are not "the culture" cancelling infidels. We are the "infidels" striking back at the cultural revolution that has poisoned our culture.