Late Night Last Week: A New Daily Show Star Emerges as Reactions to Colbert Continue
(Photo: Comedy Central, ABC, CBS)
Each week, Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. This week, we cover a new wave of reactions to Stephen Colbert’s cancellation, Josh Johnson’s superb first week behind the desk of The Daily Show, and Robert Klein’s 89th appearance on The Tonight Show.
The big news in late night television last week remained Stephen Colbert. The CBS host returned following a weekend spent processing the news of The Late Show’s cancellation. “It sunk in that they killed off our show, but they made one mistake,” Colbert said on the July 21 broadcast. “They left me alive.”
Colbert figured the audience might be in need of a pick-me-up, so he invited Lin-Manuel Miranda and Weird Al Yankovic to the stage to sing “Viva La Vida,” an obvious reference to that viral moment from a recent Coldplay concert. A spotlight then moved around the room, highlighting a number of Colbert’s fellow late night hosts who gathered in the Ed Sullivan theater to show solidarity , including NBC’s Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, former Daily Show colleagues John Oliver and Jon Stewart, and New Year’s Eve duo Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper.
The news last week also shifted away from Colbert, as Trey Stone and Matt Parker began the latest season of South Park (another Paramount property) with a depiction of Trump that included the president literally undressing and getting into bed with Satan. The creators issued a sarcastic apology.
But the new cycle quickly pivoted back to include Colbert, especially after the man who founded Late Night, David Letterman, came out and called the company’s decision “gutless.” But now that the week of reactions has passed, the real question becomes, what now? It is clear that Colbert himself is still figuring out how to navigate this final era of his Late Night tenure. The show of solidarity from his fellow hosts was sweet, but one couldn’t help but wish for more, to actually hear from them—perhaps that will come later.
Colber—and indeed us all—can take solace in this fact: the history of comedy is the history of such set-backs, of poking the bear and sometimes getting bitten. That threat is what makes it all worth doing. And so now we wait with bated breath to see not just how Colbert responds, but how the rest of the comedy world will make sure they don’t get bitten too.
The week also brought a wave of on-air reactions from Colbert’s fellow late night hosts, most notably over on Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart declared: “I’m not giving in! I’m not going anywhere!”
“I think?” he added.
Stewart was scathing in his critique of Paramount, which owns both CBS and Comedy Central. He took the view that the cancellation was, in fact, a political move. But he was also realistic about the cultural and financial status of late night television, describing the genre as “a Blockbuster kiosk inside of a Tower Records.” Yet in acknowledging that truth, Stewart made the point that such struggles did not mean that the network should just ditch and run.
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