Left in the lurch
Late-night hosts who spew knee-jerk hate at President Trump have lost their sense of humor
HE rose to fame parodying a blowhard. Is he aware he’s become one?
Last Tuesday, “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert — who’d been struggling in the ratings until the election — made national headlines for a monologue that, as it does nightly, skewered President Trump.
He began by defending John Dickerson, a veteran journalist Trump recently dismissed mid-interview. Colbert, who loves to remind viewers that he’s a devout Catholic, opened with moral outrage — outrage Dickerson, who is also the political director of CBS News, presumably didn’t request. Nevertheless, Dickerson’s humiliation would be Colbert’s to avenge.
“Donald Trump,” Colbert said, “John Dickerson is a fair-minded journalist and one of the most competent people who will ever walk into your office, and you treat him like that?”
Yes, the average viewer of latenight TV, worried about getting up for work tomorrow and paying bills, surely has room to be upset on behalf of a well-regarded, highly compensated journalist. Moving on:
“Sir,” Colbert continued, “you attract more skinheads than Rogaine. You have more people marching against you than cancer. You talk like a sign-language gorilla that got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c--k holster.”
The monologue isn’t offensive politically. It’s offensive because it’s just not funny. Colbert fails to see the irony in taking umbrage at Trump’s crude insults by hurling crude insults.
In a recent piece on Colbert in The New Yorker, TV critic Emily Nussbaum, formerly a fan, noted Colbert’s comedic devolution. “Attacking Trump isn’t in itself subversive,” she wrote, adding that his Trump-focused monologues “feel cognitively draining, not unlike political punditry.”
And it’s not just Colbert. There’s an archness and stridency among his fellow “Daily Show” alums like John Oliver and Samantha Bee, and it’s unclear what they hope to accomplish. Oliver quite literally yells for 30 minutes at an audience that already agrees with him. Same with Bee, who last week told CNN’s Jake Tapper that there was no such thing as a “smug liberal problem” — and even if there is, her show in no way contributes.
“I do the show for me and for people like me,” Bee said. “And I don’t really care how the rest of the world sees it, quite frankly.”
Such unblinking self-righteousness is, perhaps, a logical outgrowth of this past election cycle. Hillary Clinton’s biggest problem was her affect: She was smarter than her opponents. She was smarter than voters who didn’t agree with her. She was affronted when the media asked her questions she didn’t like. In debates she lectured; at rallies she hectored. She called a huge swath of the electorate racists, sexists, Islamophobes and deplorables. She was superior in every way. Look how that worked out. Yet few lessons have been learned on the left, certainly not among those late-night hosts who, one would think, might be interested in expanding their viewership — maybe even winning converts. But it’s hard to see a Trump voter tuning in for more vilification from East Coast liberals, who tend to reinforce each other’s worst tendencies. Two weeks ago, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Lena Dunham praised Bee for her on-air delivery.
“You act as if you’re explaining something to your blind, deaf and dumb grandfather at Thanksgiving,” Dunham said. “How did you settle on the Samantha Bee persona, which is, ‘I’m here to explain this to you f--king idiots, and if you don’t wrap your brain around it, I’m going to explain it in a different way?” Dunham went on to compare Bee to a superhero. Clearly, there’s an audience, however masochistic, out there for this stuff. “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” has posted a “Trump bump” in post-election ratings, going from 1.32 million viewers last December to 2.51 million in February. Colbert, who’d been struggling heavily against the apolitical Jimmy Fallon, has also seen a clear rating spike, yet he remains ahead of Fallon by only a few hundred-thousand eyeballs. In a recent, wide-ranging interview with New York Magazine, David Letterman cast shade on his successor’s anti-Trump fixation. “A lot of people have been able to root themselves in the Trump tsunami, and Stephen is one of them,” Letterman said. “I’m aware that Stephen has been able to solidify his position.” So, too, have others: Seth Meyers is just as political, but he has a much lighter touch and meets the Trump administration on its own ground, as theater of the absurd. Fallon caught a lot of heat for hosting Trump preelection and ruffling his hair, but his ratings have held steady. Most notable, however, is Jimmy Kimmel, who delivered a heartfelt monologue about his infant son’s life-saving surgery and, in the run-up to the vote on repealing ObamaCare, the importance of preserving it. “If your baby is going to die, and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make,” Kimmel said. “I think that’s something, whether you’re a Republican or Democrat or something else, we all agree on that, right?” It was human, humble and, most importantly, effective. By Friday, physician and Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said any new health-care legislation should “pass the Jimmy Kimmel test.” That, Colbert and his ilk should note, is how you begin to move the needle.