What do the Watchmen graphic novel, Bollywood and America have in common? They all have to deal with the mystery of a missing ‘comedian’. For starters, in between his work making imperialist propaganda with CGI abs and the trials and tribulations of crusaders fighting film critics, Zack Snyder made Watchmen, a graphic novel retelling disguised as a film whose plot revolves around the sudden demise of a misogynistic psychopath named The Comedian.The same problem plagues Bollywood, not misogynistic psychopaths, although they may have been there, but missing comedians. Earlier, Bollywood plots used to be clearly divided: the hero brags about his relationship with his mother, the mother looks stoic and sad, the heroine dances, the villain drinks a bottle of 69 while usurping the land of the poor, and the comedian makes the audience laugh. All that changed with Dharmendra’s comedic turn in Chupke Chupke and Amitabh Bachchan’s exchange of the angry young man for a swaggering clown in Amar Akbar Anthony.The process that began in the 1970s eventually came to an end by the 1990s, when Chi Chi appeared on screen and the boundary between hero and comedian collapsed like a wave function at the moment it was observed. This was rather difficult for the professional comedians who lived and died by audience laughter: the Johnny Walkers, Mehmood, Kishto Mukherjees, Asranis, Jagdeep Sahab and the Pentals of the World, men who once existed as separate comedy planets but increasingly found themselves revolving around heroes who had learned to do their own jokes.
It was the pre-AI equivalent of a product manager driving programmers to extinction by coding with Claude.And now America finds itself on the same precipice with the same problem statement: the missing comedian, which is strange considering that America is the nation that worships at the altar of the former and supports the latter.But it’s telling us something when the visiting king is funnier than most late-night TV hosts, which brings us to the current predicament as CBS is set to pull the plug on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. Colbert is a comedian who has survived 3,000 episodes over 20 years and two TV networks, so his acolytes are clearly a little upset. The reaction was predictable, with CNN’s Roy Wood Jr. praising him for his “commitment to the truth” and Hasan Minhaj praising him for “always meeting the moment.”So why is CBS pulling the plug? Is it just to please Mr. Orange?
That may be part of the reason, but it’s not the only reason, so let’s open the box to explain and examine the true nature of the Schrödinger-like cat-like state of comedy in America, and late-night comedy in particular.First, while Colbert’s allies may praise him for “sticking to the truth,” it is common to point out that Colbert’s truth was often biased.Take, for example, the coverage during the run-up to the 2024 US election, where Colbert was an unabashed fan of Kamala Harris, singing about her “verbal kung fu” and even covering her quotes with Morpheus calling her “the chosen one.” This is of course his prerogative, but the public, voters, and even reality disagreed with him.
Harris’ campaign was dead on arrival. The same candidate who failed to muster a single vote at the 2020 Democratic National Convention was given the mantle of leadership once Biden’s waning mental acuity became impossible to hide. Arriving late in the game, Harris failed to explain how her campaign differed from Biden’s, and consistently stumbled through interviews to the point that they had to be edited out, leading to legal wrangling of her own.It was not just Colbert who became the de facto media arm of the Democratic Party. All of his peers are less comedic and more oratorical, constantly yelling at the scientist because he disagrees with their worldview, which, in Jay Leno’s words, “alienates half the audience.”Now comedians of all eras tend to lean left and take shots at the loudest and most powerful.While the likes of Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and David Letterman made political jokes, they were usually light and nonpartisan, without deep ideological commitment, to avoid alienating the network’s fandom audiences.
As a study titled “Discovering Trump: Repoliticizing American Late-Night Talk Shows in a Polarized Public Sphere,” published online on May 24, 2025, noted, that changed with Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, which satirized George Bush’s fictional war on terror, focusing on attacking Bush, Fox News, the neocons, and the Iraq War, becoming the Fifth Estate, then promptly collapsing once Obama arrived, who was treated more kindly.Then Trump arrived to shatter the equation, going from being treated as ridiculous comedy gold to a threat to minorities, democratic norms, and everything else. Over time, comedy became increasingly absent, replaced by moralizing that would have been expected in the pulpit rather than on late-night television.But even speeches need sponsors, and that’s where the economics get brutal.
The second reason the comedy is faltering is financial: Colbert may be the leading star of the late-night shows, but that’s like being the number one store in the Netflix era.
The entire ecosystem has collapsed, with revenue falling from $439 million in 2018 to $220 million in 2024, and CBS reportedly losing $40 million a year sponsoring comic ideological crusades.The third reason is the arrival of other forms of entertainment. From roasts to podcasts to memes, where anyone with a camera has become a comedy content creator, late night hosts are starting to resemble dinosaurs trying to survive meteorites from all sides.
Who would wait until 9pm to watch a joke on TV when barely anyone is watching TV? The best cuts can always be chopped up and repurposed into snackable mini rolls that can be shared on the countless platforms out there right now.
Among them was CompanyPerhaps the fourth and biggest reason behind the demise of the comedian in America is the same reason in Bollywood, where comedians had to move to David Dhawan’s proverbial protected species sanctuary in order to survive: the leading man became too funny.
From Dharmendra to Amitabh Bachchan to Govinda to Troika Khan to Akshay Kumar, comedy is no longer limited to the comedian.
The same is true in America, where no late-night comedian can hope to compete with Trump when it comes to laughter, which is often punctuated by tears. If Reagan was a purveyor of Soviet jokes, and Obama was the first president of alternative comedy, Trump is every kind of comedy wrapped up in one tight drum.He’s the kind of guy who goes crazy B to China, despite the Epstein Files, then waxes lyrical about how beautiful children are. He can’t stop talking about a dead golfer’s junk, discusses his lifelong desire to become a whale psychiatrist, and listens intently when someone explains the effects of cocaine. He sprays the former terrorists with cologne before giving one perfume to his wife and then inquires if he has more than one wife. He decorates his halls with gold, goes on about his dance floor with anyone who will listen, mocks his allies for seizing Ozimbek, declares victory after breaking the world’s economy, kidnaps the leaders of foreign countries and forces news organizations to conduct fact-checks on whether he has peeked into Xi Jinping’s notebook. Forget comedians, even reality can’t compete with that. And quite frankly, who needs a comedian when Trump is your president.
