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In January 2010, Conan O’Brien signed a contract after a short stint as host of Tonight show.
Thanks to NBC’s awkward “Hey, let’s give the 10 p.m. hour to Jay Leno” maneuver, Conan barely spent seven months in the hosting chair — a blunder so egregious that it overshadowed the entire broadcast lineup for months, and so you can totally make fun of it to this day.
O’Brien spent five years as Leno’s heir-appointed, then was consigned to the trash can in less than the time of a hippopotamus, so if anyone has a right to be angry, and if anyone has a wide range of targets for that anger, it’s him.
Instead, O’Brien thanked NBC, his television home for 22 years, and then offered advice to his young audience. “Please, don’t be sarcastic,” O’Brien said. “I hate sarcasm. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality, and it leads nowhere. No one in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work hard and are kind, amazing things will happen.”
It was the kind of carefully deployed sentiment that late-night hosts often reserve for moments of national tragedy and passing, but rarely use as staples of their everyday vernacular. It’s the kind of work in which it’s easier to use sarcasm, casual sarcasm, or all-out sarcasm as tonal supports rather than sincerity.
Stephen Colbert delivered thorough satire for nine seasons and 1,447 episodes on Comedy Central The Colbert Reportone of the most convoluted, hilarious, and surprisingly long-running practical jokes ever put to the small screen — a satirical response to a type of conservative critic that barely existed when the show began and became extinct long before it ended. The Colbert Report It was never a satirical show, but it was a show that often fueled cynicism in its audience, which ultimately turned out to be a good reason. In retrospect, the series was unbearably prescient, but its host closed the show by breaking out of his established persona with a star-studded cover of “We’ll Meet Again” and a heartfelt farewell.
when The Colbert Report It ended and Colbert exited, replacing David Letterman as host Late Showthe big question people at my job asked over and over again — Colbert asked him, he asked his producers, he asked each other — was who Stephen Colbert was without the coating of well-applied sarcasm. There was some fear – reinforced in the difficult opening months of Late Showwhen it seemed possible The Late Show with Stephen Colbert May compete The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien In terms of unplanned brevity – the answer might be “like everyone else’s late at night”.
With both Colbert and Late Show As we head into their final show on Thursday, May 21, we’ve had 11 years to think of a different answer.
Colbert rose to fame in a world tinged with politics Daily show. (Okay, okay. Colbert rose to fame Strangers with candywhich is streaming on Paramount+ and remains a masterpiece of the most niche genre.)
At any time during his career Late Show Colbert’s political humor seemed necessary to me. It was essential for anyone doing their job at the time he was doing it. Colbert version Late Show It launched and ran in the middle of both Peak TV generally and Peak Late Night TV, a brief window in which there were the usual suspects – white men named “James”, as the joke accurately goes – giving live broadcasts to insomniacs, but also performing opposite the likes of Samantha Bee, Robin Thede, Amber Ruffin and Desus & Mero. Rest in peace to all their shows, which ended long before the “hard late night environment” died. Late Show also.
All responded to the same blunders as Donald Trump and ramped up their anger to address the same infringement on basic rights. But when it comes to those required jokes (even if Jimmy Corden and James Fallon did fewer of them), Colbert’s versions were never the best or the worst, and when next Monday rolls around, I won’t be sad about not getting Colbert’s mind no matter what happens over the weekend. On the other hand, I’m still sad that Bee, Thede, and Ruffin don’t have regular weekly platforms.
What set Colbert apart, and allowed his colleagues — including Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers — to do their versions of the same thing, is a lack of cynicism, and an abundance of sincerity. For a man who made his name playing an obviously fictional character and shares that name, Colbert’s ability to present an unaffected, unaffected version of himself is what I will miss most. (Except that Colbert will hopefully and presumably still be around in some capacity.) This was the approach that defined Colbert’s best moments for me. Late Show.
After its rocky start, which included a change in showrunner and more, the turning point for the show, at least for me, was the November 2016 live election episode, when Colbert had to process the results in real time. Instead, the evening that Colbert and most of his peers had expected to conclude in relief and vindication ended with Colbert’s own version of Conan’s anti-cynicism speech, a plea for unity that…well…didn’t go so well. Looking back, it may have been a bit superficial and annoying, but in the moment it was what many of us needed.
This line of devotion was not tied to political identity.
Colbert wasn’t even code-switching. In her recent interview with Colbert. THRThe New York Times’ Lacey Rose raised the possibility that his actual political leanings are, in many cases, more conservative than most people might imagine. As a wealthy white man who grew up in the South and was devoted to his Catholicism, Colbert demographically could or should have been as right-leaning as his colleagues. The Colbert Report a personality. However, as with him, Colbert used his honesty to cover the territory conservatives tried to claim — and to do it better than any conservative pundit on television, without being a conservative.
When Colbert spoke about his faith, he did so in a way that never seemed contrived or confrontational. I’m still amazed when I think about his conversation about comedy and religion with Dua Lipa — an interview that sounds like a short sentence, or something that logically shouldn’t exist, but turns out to be more frank and theologically rigorous than anything the most devout men and women at Fox News have expressed in that channel’s entire history.
When Toby Keith died, Colbert’s reflection on the loss of his friend was more powerful than any other tribute I’ve read or seen to the country music star.
Right-wingers have turned the “Jimmy Kimmel cries about everything” song into a running, inaccurate joke, but no one dared do the same to Colbert. No one has ever wondered whether Colbert means what he says about grief, faith, or J. R. R. Tolkien.
Even though he had the opportunity to say goodbye for one year, Colbert still deserves better. He deserved better than — if you believe the CBS brass — a victim of a time period that was no longer financially rewarding for the multibillion-dollar companies facing it. He deserved better than – if you don’t believe the CBS brass – to be a martyr for the freedom of speech that was marginalized so that the government wouldn’t interfere with the ability of a multibillion-dollar company to acquire another multi-billion-dollar company while our country’s CEO laughs on social media.
But that’s cynical, and Conan O’Brien told me not to be cynical, and Stephen Colbert would probably prefer that too.
So instead, I’ll be unironically looking forward to how Stephen Colbert says his goodbyes and what comes next.
