We're ALL Doing Safe Comedy
The market punishes risk-takers
Here’s how the end of The Late Show feels to me: It’s like I have a friend who’s been missing for ten years, and the police just called to tell me that they finally found the body. I watched Letterman religiously for 20 years, only sometimes flipping away — ironically — when The Colbert Report emerged in the late 2000s. These days, late night TV plays no role in my life; I never watch, I’ll almost certainly never work in the genre again, and my only connection to those shows is sepia-toned memories that feel like they should be accompanied by wistful French accordion music. This happens to me eight to ten times per day:
Conservatives, of course, are dancing on The Late Show’s grave. Fox News cutup Greg Gutfeld had some especially scathing remarks.
Gutfeld’s point about Colbert skewering easy targets to the delight of his highly partisan audience would have landed better if Gutfeld hadn’t been — at that very moment — skewering an easy target to the delight of his highly partisan audience. Greg Gutfeld is a man who tells jokes about Hunter Biden on Fox News — IMHO, that’s not exactly the second coming of Lenny Bruce. I haven’t seen that little self awareness since John Oliver chided people for talking about trans women in sports as part of his extra-long, 42-minute episode about trans women in sports.
Colbert and Gutfeld both do partisan comedy; the only difference is that one’s on the blue team and one’s on the red team. Their emergence would probably shock someone who teleported here from 1988, a time when a scathing late night political take might be “Dan Quayle — no philosopher prince is he!” The emergence of bespoke comedy for distinct viewpoints seems bad to me; it seems like a product of the same forces that brought feverish partisanship, unhinged conspiracy mongering, and 31 flavors of anti-Semitism into the political mainstream. And I don’t know what to do about that trend other than to talk about it so that we at least know where we are.
