Stephen Colbert and The Attempted Murder of Comedy

How late night became unfunny

Comedy is not dead, not even mostly dead, but in recent years its enemies and ours have surged in their assassination attempts.

Their attacks on the life of comedy are no more a coincidence than their attacks on the life of Donald Trump. They are an integral component of our Fascist Left’s semi-Gramscian, quasi-Frankfurt School, Marxesque drive to seize the heights of our culture. From there they seek to deploy fake comedians to wipe out the funny and replace it with “liberating tolerance,” which, to quote their demi-guru Herbert Marcuse, consists of “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”

Marcuse wasn’t kidding; he sincerely hated freedom of speech.

Let us pause for a brief glance back in time. Human beings have always laughed, but historically recorded comedy started in ancient Athens. In the fifth century BCE, Aristophanes wrote comic plays such as The Clouds, which lampooned his neighbor Socrates. This was “Old Comedy,” which some have labeled the “comedy of ideas,” and which emerged at the height of Athenian democracy, when ideas were all over the place.

A century or so later, in about 320 BCE, another Athenian named Menander introduced “New Comedy,” which featured frustrated lovers who got together in the end only by overcoming obstacles and disentangling complications and clearing up confusions. This comedy caught on and sank deep roots, which explains why, with the exception of Shakespeare and a few others, for the past 2,300 years we’ve endured almost nothing but sitcoms.

We Hebrews also had our own version of funny, at least as far back as the Book of Jonah or the Book of Esther, depending on whether you get the joke.

Nowadays, just as legacy political parties designate official leaders, legacy media designate official comedians, foremost among them the three late-night network talk show hosts, Jimmy Kimmel (ABC), Jimmy Fallon (NBC), and Stephen Colbert (CBS).

I will focus on Stephen Colbert, in part because he’s the nastiest, but also out of personal spite. Everything about him ticks me off. (I concede that once I say “spite” I can no longer take it back.)

Back in 1982, my wife Susan embarked on a very successful twenty-five-year career as a standup comic. She started at The Minneapolis Dudley Riggs Experimental Theatre on Seven Corners. She can still be found as Ammo Grrrll, funny as ever, every Friday, writing instead of talking.

At that time Dudley also operated another club in town, called Brave New Workshop, which was the venue for improvisational skits, a Minneapolis take on Chicago’s more famous Second City. (Actually, Brave New Workshop preceded Second City by several months.)

But standup was catching on. Paying audiences grew. People lined up with money in their hands.

The Brave New Workshop performers eyed these crowds and dreamed daring dreams. They were accomplished thespians who could do all the things actors train to do, like sing and dance and fence and juggle and pretend fight.

And standup is simple, right? You just talk. What could be easier?

Everything, it turned out. As standups, even great actors like Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hanks and Sally Fields suffer by comparison to the real article. If you don’t believe me, check out their pathetic stabs at standup in the movies Lenny and Punchline. (Tip: don’t pay to watch them.)

None of the actors from Brave New Workshop was a funny standup. I know. I watched. Life provides few minor vicissitudes outside dental work more painful than being stuck in your seat while an unfunny comedian flounders about on stage, trying too hard to make you laugh.

In 2015, to replace the retiring actual standup comic David Letterman as its late-night talk show host, CBS hired the actor Stephen Colbert to play the role of comedian.

Colbert reminds me of Margaret Brennan, another very limited actor CBS hired to play the role of journalist. Brennan can recite lines she picked up from someone else (likely the same writers who wrote for Biden’s teleprompter) but displayed in her recent failure to gotcha J.D. Vance a near invincible ignorance, even of the specific subject matter upon which she should have boned up beforehand.

That, by the way, was comedy, which is funniest when it is unintentional (“I don’t care, Margaret.” In case you haven’t seen it:

It’s almost as funny as “Do you hear yourself, Martha?”

As I said, Stephen Colbert is not a comedian but an actor. As he speaks his lines, Colbert employs his professional actor chops to mimic the physical movements and hand gestures and facial expressions he has copped from standups.

In fact, Colbert started his show business career acting. I saw him in a 2004 episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent. He portrayed a forger and murderer named James Bennett, in which role he prefigured his future performance as CBS late night host (It’s probably a coincidence, but when I searched IMDB’s Stephen Colbert page, I found no mention of this minor acting role.)

By 2004 Colbert was already appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. From Stewart, Colbert learned the “clown-nose on, clown-nose off” shtick which allows comedians to push comical-sounding lies for serious political purpose and then retreat into unaccountability because after all they are just joking.

Here is Colbert at work:

A lot of things happen in this clip. In May, 2017, when Colbert announced Comey’s firing, Democrats were still supposed to hate Comey for his investigation of Hillary’s private email server. Comey’s public report about some of her crimes had supposedly cost her the 2016 election. Naturally, Colbert’s crowd of partisan democrats cheered Comey’s firing.

But Colbert caught his celebrating followers off guard when he accused them of the most heinous offense, being “huge Donald Trump fans.”

It has happened to all of us, this guilt by association with Trump. In 2020, when I questioned the destructive COVID lockdowns by pointing out that 1969’s fabled Woodstock festival occurred in the middle of a terrible flu epidemic, my best friend from high school demanded, “Are you a Trump supporter?” (Read it with an intense sneer in your mental voice.)

Colbert brandished his threat in order to reorient his subservient followers to the new official version of reality, in which he and other Democrats turned Comey into a martyred hero of the “resistance” because Comey was investigating Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election.

Colbert’s audience may have started out one lie behind, but they caught on right away. With the agility of trained monkeys, they responded with thunderous applause to Colbert’s subsequent mediocre Trump impression and cheap sexual reference.

Here’s another clip of Colbert at work:

The only pushback to Colbert’s obscenity came from a few who heard it as an insult to gay men, which Colbert denied.

That clip demonstrates the most obvious maneuver of the unfunny comic, which is to substitute foul language for punchline.

Dirty words confront audience members with a choice. If they are nervous and unsure how to respond, then what? “Am I supposed to laugh? Well, he’s an officially designated comedian. The others are laughing. I guess I should laugh too.”

Notably, America’s funniest actual comedians, for example Bob Newhart and Jerry Seinfeld and Jack Benny, never resorted to obscene punchlines to bludgeon audiences. More recently, popular standups like Nate Bargatze and Jim Gaffigan follow their example. (For those interested, Dry Bar Comedy on YouTube is a good venue for “clean” comics. Some of them probably hold leftist political opinions, for all I know or care.)

Among great comedians, Richard Pryor was the exception. But he learned his foul language growing up in a whorehouse, where depravity was normal behavior and obscenity was everyday conversation.

Of course, Colbert’s foul insult served a purpose other than earning easy laughs. Putting the hate on Trump was his path to clapter. Clapter is the hack’s substitute for laughter. When audience members responded to Colbert with clapter, they were signifying their approval of his nastiness and their shared hatred of Donald Trump.

Admittedly, Colbert has studied his actor’s craft. Colbert’s facial expressions and physical movements and vocal intonations promise he must be funny. It is easy to mistake the promise for its keeping. The more one buys the Russia Hoax and other legacy media lies, the more effective Colbert seems. Otherwise, why are all these other people claptering?

Colbert has employed his high ground as network host to seize another advantage. In the bizarro world of our Fascist Left, it is permissible only to “punch up,” not “down,” which means to point the scornful finger only at the beneficiaries of “oppression” and not at oppression’s victims. By a contorted logic to which no rational person would dare subject his intellect, a rich Hollywood actor who insults poor and working-class Trump supporters is punching “up” and not “down.”

As I write this, all three legacy TV networks continue to employ unfunny hacks as late-night talk show hosts, despite the phenomenal audience growth for Greg Gutfeld, who sometimes can be funny himself, who features real comedians as guests, and who operates on a cable news network whose weeknight audience is far smaller than that of ABC or CBS or NBC.

Here’s another clip:

Oops. Wrong hack. But the clip does invite questions about the identity of the real Putin colluder, doesn’t it?

Why did all three of the biggest networks choose three of the biggest loads on two feet as their official late-night hosts? Is it coincidence? Or am I just another conspiracy theorist?

Here’s my guess: hatred. Our overlords hate us and they hate our culture. If follows that they must also hate our laughter.

With reason. Laughter is ruthless. Laughter respects nothing, especially not position or power or any official version of reality. Even the comedy which seems on its surface most innocuous, like the hackneyed “Did you ever wonder?” or “Did you ever notice?” is a threat to those who seek control over what the rest of us are allowed to wonder or to notice.

That’s one motive; here’s another. The faithful of our Fascist Left hate laughter for the same reasons they hate everything else about normal people. They hate the great artists of the past and Western Civilization and Christianity and especially us Jews. They hate sex which makes babies and the humans who engage in it, as well as those among us who dare hang on to the baby-making and baby-feeding body parts God gave us. They hate marriage. They hate love and truth and beauty, especially beauty in buildings or language or music.

Our wannabe overlords hate all sources of joy outside their own powers of dispensation, especially the powers they guard the way dragons guard their legendary hoards of gold, by which I mean the power to grant and the power to take away. Of course, those are both the same power, aren’t they?

Is it any surprise that a faction which celebrates the ugliest buildings and the crassest art and the obscenest songs also subsidizes the unfunniest comedians?

Of course, the Russia Hoax is gone, but it is not forgotten. Trump’s election could and should trigger a legal reckoning for our recent regime’s overweening abuse of federal power and its ancillary federal crime wave.

Soon, like the Russia Hoax they helped perpetrate, Stephen Colbert and his hack fellow travelers may disappear from our public life as well.

Don’t feel sorry for them. They will retire to great wealth. If they still need to feed their voracious appetites for public adoration, they can teach at the universities their bosses will continue to control at least a while longer.

Max Cossack is an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). His most recent novel is High Jingo. He lives in Arizona with his wife in a house besieged by greedy feral cats she insists on feedingdespite their open contempt for all human beings.