For me, peak Colbert has been what he’s done with “The Late Show” since he got fired. It’s akin to the way Republican Gov. George Ryan cleared death row in my home state of Illinois on his way to prison: With nothing to lose, the man was at his absolute best.
But in the last days of “The Late Show,” which ends on Thursday, it’s become clear that there are two kinds of non-Trumpers arguing about Stephen Colbert this week. There are those who think that “The Colbert Report,” which aired from 2005 to 2014, was so much funnier because “The Late Show” is softer, and then there are those of us who might prefer the latter for that same reason.
In a piece called “Too-Even Stephen,” Gene Weingarten, who is plenty funny himself, wrote that on “The Colbert Report,” the comedian was “blindingly brilliant because he was permitted to not be himself. He was a gentleman, licensed to act like an asshole.” But once he dropped that bit, well, zzzz.
Weingarten continued: “David Letterman – whom Colbert replaced – had been biting and inventive on the job because Letterman’s comedy emerged naturally from his discomfort in life and with himself, and his instinct for confrontation. It’s just who he was. That was not Colbert. Colbert is a devout Roman Catholic. He was the guy who worked a 10-hour day in the fruit- picking fields so he could testify in Congress about the plight of farmworkers … Colbert had an edge, but it wasn’t serrated. The times called for something harsher.”
Did they? Insufficiently scathing, one of my friends agreed. So dull compared to Letterman, who was “by all accounts a horrible person in the workplace,” an online commenter said, while “Colbert is kind and a rule follower.” Oh no, not that.
Only, what we are missing, in life, late night, or at any other time of day, is surely not “something harsher.” That front is well and truly covered.
It isn’t as though Colbert is timid; his show – top-rated since 2016 – was canceled two days after he called the $16 million his bosses at CBS and Paramount paid President Trump to settle a suit over the perfectly normal editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris “a big fat bribe.”
But what I get from the real Stephen Colbert are laughs with some depth and humanity. Is someone else going to have 86-year-old Ian McKellen jump up and do a monologue from the play “Sir Thomas More” – Shakespeare’s “The Strangers’ Case,” set during the 1517 riots in London, with the future saint sent in to cool down the mob protesting against immigrants? (And are you sure that wasn’t “something harsher” than Jimmy Kimmel’s joke about Melania having the glow of an expectant widow? Because I am not.)
Is someone else going to lament that Walt Whitman isn’t getting his due these days, and then have Edward Norton bring the house down with a recitation of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”?
Are others going to mix it up knowledgeably with Father James Martin over the latest Pope Leo news?
Or have Bernadette Peters, Ben Platt, Christopher Jackson, Annaleigh Ashford, and Patrick Wilson sing Sondheim’s “Putting It Together”? Colbert made Sondheim cry during an interview when he told him that, at 19, that song had made him understand what he wanted to do with his life.
Colbert himself choked up, and I did too, when he spoke about his close friendship with conservative country great Toby Keith right after his death. That ability to love across borders is something we are going to need if we are ever going to remember how to be a country again.
In The Washington Post, Will Leitch wrote that, “You can tell from the last episode of ‘The Colbert Report,’ which aired Dec. 18, 2014, that Colbert wanted to unite, not divide. In the final segment, he began to sing “We’ll Meet Again” as a comically absurd number of celebrities, from every corner of entertainment and politics, joined him onstage – from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Mike Huckabee to Cookie Monster.” True.
During the intensely partisan Trump era, though, Leitch concluded, Colbert’s “safe jokes” were fine and nothing more. Not true.
The one time I saw “The Late Show” in the Ed Sullivan Theater was when I was in then-Vice President Joe Biden’s press pool, on the evening that he taped the show and spoke about losing his son Beau to cancer when that loss was still fresh.
Their 20-minute interview about grief, something Colbert knows about all too well, is not something a lot of comedians or anybody else could have handled as he did, with grace.
It might be pure coincidence, but in the multiple conversations I’ve had and seen online about Colbert Report vs. Late Show in recent days, it seems to me that the split is along the lines of what we used to see among Democrats – more left versus more centrist.
I say “used to” because with an anti-MAGA coalition that includes Zohran Mamdani and Mona Charen, Bernie Sanders, and Bill Kristol, those differences are larger than ever, yet in the current context, about as important as which Stephen Colbert show you have preferred.
That’s pretty much what Colbert said about his own politics last year, in an interview right after he was canceled: “People perceive me as this sort of lefty figure; I think I’m more conservative than people think,” he said. “I just happen to be talking about a government in extremis. And so what I’m giving you is my reaction video to the day. And my reaction video is like The Scream, in a way, but with jokes. So that makes me perceived as more left necessarily than I am because I’m not sure what other reaction would be an honest one. It’s hard to have a balanced reaction to the idea of troops on streets of a city that actually is not undergoing an invasion.”
The Colbert Report would never work today. Because how can you parody a Secretary of War who bans photographers from briefings over unflattering photos of himself? Or a president who can’t stop talking about building “the most beautiful and spectacular ballroom anywhere in the world” when the cost of gas and groceries is making life harder for those Americans not invited to state dinners?
Whereas the authentic, yes, generally un-serrated actual Stephen Colbert made me laugh every time I watched, even at the stupid stuff. In this heartless moment in history, his goofball goodness and poetry were something I did not see elsewhere, and am grateful that I got to see it at all.
