Stephen Colbert brought on his own cancellation

OPINION:

’Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away).’

That was the title of a Top 20 hit song by the heavy metal band Motley Crue in 1990, but the phrase seems strangely relevant and particularly timely this week as the curtain falls for the final time on Stephen Colbert and his weeknight CBS program, “The Late Show.”

Mr. Colbert — who has hosted the show for just over a decade, since taking over from David Letterman in September 2015 — has increasingly turned what was once a comedy, music and celebrity guest talk show into a platform for his stridently left-wing political views and, more specifically, for his animus toward President Trump.

Mr. Colbert might not have cared about having an audience half the size of what it could have been had he not alienated Republican viewers, but CBS — and, perhaps more important, the advertisers who paid his $15 million annual salary — finally did.

Network brass, citing high production costs and declining advertising revenue, announced the show’s cancellation on July 17, 2025, giving him a 10-month layoff notice.

As such, Mr. Colbert is hardly a political martyr, much less the persecuted truth teller that he is making himself out to be.

In the lead-up to the show’s final telecast on Thursday, Mr. Colbert has been holding nightly pity parties, calling attention to himself and to the program’s imminent demise.

For the May 10 episode of “The Late Show,” Mr. Colbert brought on his fellow late-night TV hosts Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver — all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, lefties — for what amounted to a consoling group hug.

On May 11, it was “Seinfeld” alum Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a longtime Colbert pal, who dropped in to say goodbye. In a sycophantic “interview” afterward with The Hollywood Reporter, Ms. Louis-Dreyfus hyperventilated that Mr. Colbert “holds a very powerful mirror up to our democracy,” adding: “I believe that it’s the comedians who we rely on in these trying times. [Mr. Colbert’s cancellation] is right out of the authoritarian playbook, so I’m deeply concerned as an artist.”

On May 13, actor Tom Hanks told Mr. Colbert, who turned 62 that day, that he wasn’t sure “how the entertainment-industrial complex is going to survive without you.” The “Forrest Gump” star presented Mr. Colbert with a birthday present of a box of paper and a portable typewriter. “You’re going to be doing some serious resume writing,” he joked.

Mr. Kimmel — who on British TV in December said, “My country’s president would like to shut me up because I don’t adore him in the way he likes to be adored” — announced last week that his “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” would not be live Thursday night. Instead, he will air a rerun, presumably as a show of “solidarity” with Mr. Colbert’s Trump derangement syndrome.

In hindsight, Mr. Colbert would have done well to heed 30-year NBC “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson, who, in a 1979 interview, was asked by Mike Wallace on CBS’s “60 Minutes” why he never took on “serious controversy.”

“That’s not what I’m there for. Can’t they see that?” the GOAT of late-night TV answered. “Why do they think that just because you have ‘The Tonight Show’ that you must deal in serious issues? That’s a danger. It’s a real danger,” Carson added. “Once you start that, you start to get the self-important feeling that what you say has great import. And you know, strangely enough, you could use that show as a forum. You could sway people. And I don’t think you should, as an entertainer.”

Carson’s “Tonight Show” successor, Jay Leno, had an even more pointed answer. Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation last July — coincidentally, just days before CBS announced Mr. Colbert’s cancellation — Mr. Leno mused: “Why shoot for just half an audience all the time, right? You know, why not try to get the whole, I mean … I like to bring people into the big picture. I don’t understand why you would alienate one group.”

Mr. Leno, who hosted “The Tonight Show” for 22 years, added: “I love political humor, don’t get me wrong, but what happens is, people wind up cozying too much to one side or the other. I don’t think anybody wants to hear a lecture.”

To be clear, Mr. Colbert, just like every other American, has a right to free speech and to his opinions. What he does not have a right to is an enormous soapbox and megaphone on national TV to spew his left-wing political rantings on what is supposed to be an entertainment program.

• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.