Left-wing late-night host Stephen Colbert is discovering that when his anti-Trump tirades echo without an audience, the silence speaks louder than his jokes.
In a striking sign that viewers have grown weary of recycled attacks on President Donald Trump, even the liberal entertainment outlet Variety has grown impatient with Colberts drawn-out, self-congratulatory farewell tour, according to Western Journal. CBS pulled the plug on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in July 2025 after years of declining ratings and annual losses reportedly ranging from $40 million to $50 million, a staggering figure for a program once marketed as a flagship of late-night television.
The show is scheduled to end in May, closing out 11 seasons with Colbert at the helm and marking the end of an era that began with high expectations but ended in audience fatigue. In recent months, the program has become less a comedy show and more a televised wake, with guests lining up to lavish praise on the host and complain that his cancellation was some kind of political punishment for his anti-Trump material.
The facts tell a different story: Colberts ratings were collapsing, and the show was hemorrhaging money because it had ceased to be either funny or compelling. Rather than exiting with grace and a final burst of creativity, his twilight months on air have devolved into what Variety described as a bloated, self-indulgent exercise in ego-stroking.
What has ended up making it to air has been an increasingly puffy tribute to the shows own host, the outlet observed Thursday, capturing the sense that the program has turned inward instead of entertaining its audience. The endless bouquets being tossed Colberts way have started to make the studio smell a bit cloying.
Variety went further, warning that the narrative around Colberts departure has become muddled and tiresome. The cause of standing up for a comedian who may have been tossed aside for angering the regime is getting tied up in honoring Colbert the celebrity, and its starting to feel wearying, the publication added.
In a rare moment of candor from a left-leaning outlet, Variety acknowledged that the problem is not just CBS, but Colbert himself. Colbert deserved better treatment from CBS, but watching one person beam while receiving laurel after laurel doesnt make the argument for his shows relevance, as its frankly not very good TV, and for this relentlessly political host not in touch with the concerns of people who have been turning to The Late Show for its political perspective.
Like many progressive media figures, Colbert spent years using his platform to smear Trump and, by extension, the tens of millions of Americans who voted for him. When a performer devotes his act to mocking and belittling half the country, it should surprise no one that his audience contracts, especially when he is recycling the same anti-Trump material that saturates Hollywood and legacy media.
All of this came at a premium price: Colbert was reportedly earning $15 million a year to host the show, a salary wildly out of step with its shrinking reach. By January, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert had sunk to record-low ratings, averaging just 285,000 viewers a day in the key 25-to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet.
From a business standpoint, CBS decision was inevitable, not ideological. It makes little sense for any network to continue airing a program that bleeds tens of millions of dollars while failing to attract viewers, particularly when cheaper, more agile competitors on platforms like YouTube routinely draw larger and more engaged audiences.
Instead of wallowing in self-pity and framing his cancellation as some heroic stand against the regime, Colbert might consider himself fortunate to have been paid a fortune to do what countless online creators do more effectively for a fraction of the cost. His trajectory underscores a broader shift in comedy: where once comedians were irreverent and fearless, skewering anyone in power regardless of party, todays mainstream entertainers overwhelmingly punch in one direction.
In recent decades, most comedians and much of the entertainment industry have fixated on ridiculing conservatives while giving liberals a free pass, a pattern that is less courageous than conformist. Theres nothing daring about recycling the same jokes about half the country when you know there will be no professional or social penalty for doing so, and that herd mentality exposes just how intellectually stagnant and ideologically rigid Hollywood and the broader media complex have become.
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