Fired CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert marked the demise of his show by staging a mock funeral on Monday night and summoning his fellow embattled late-night personalities to mourn with him on air.
The spectacle brought together ABCs anti-Trump agitator Jimmy Kimmel, NBCs Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, and HBOs hardcore leftist John Oliver, all of whom have seen their own audiences erode in the Trump era, according to Breitbart. Colbert, whose brand of partisan comedy has long catered to the progressive base, treated the moment less as a sober reckoning with failure and more as a self-congratulatory wake for a genre that has steadily turned its back on half the country.
Calling this lineup of ratings-challenged hosts his best television friends, Colbert invited each of them to help burnish his legacy and rail against CBS for pulling the plug on his costly, underperforming program. The tone was less introspective than defiant, as the group seemed more interested in blaming the marketplace than examining how their relentless attacks on President Trump and conservative America helped drive viewers away.
Late night is in a bit of a weird spot right now spoiler alert. The five of us being here right now, obviously, its dangerous because we represent so much of late night. Jon Stewart is designated survivor. Someone has to survive for the president to be mad at, Colbert quipped, casting himself and his peers as indispensable foils to political power. The joke landed as a telling admission that their business model has become less about broad entertainment and more about feeding a narrow, left-leaning audience a nightly dose of anti-Trump outrage.
Colbert went on to ask the other four hosts to justify why any of their shows deserve to remain on the air, noting that he has been asked three times in the last ten months to make a case for late night. His own defense was notably thin: People like it. I enjoy doing it, he said, a response that underscored how out of touch the coastal comedy class has become with the actual viewing public.
The ratings tell a harsher story than Colberts self-assessment, with his show recently hitting its worst numbers ever, drawing a meager 285,000 viewers in the key 2554 demographic. For a broadcast network program with massive distribution and corporate backing, those figures signal not just a slump but a collapse in cultural relevance.
Kimmel attempted to spin the situation, insisting that the audience for late-night television is actually larger now than in the days of Johnny Carson. Just look at the figures, he said, offering no serious engagement with the reality that fragmented, on-demand viewing has not translated into robust loyalty for his own show or his ideological peers.
The available numbers undercut Kimmels rosy narrative, with Colbert averaging just 2.545 million viewers throughout 2025 and slipping to 2.249 million early this year. While he managed to edge out Kimmels 2.1 million and Fallons 1.25 million in a recent week, Fox News Greg Gutfeld operating from a distinctly conservative vantage point outpaced them all with 3.2 million viewers.
That dominance is even more striking given that Gutfelds program airs on cable, which reaches fewer households than the major broadcast networks that host Colbert, Kimmel, and Fallon. By contrast, Johnny Carson routinely drew between 12 million viewers in leaner years and up to 17 million at his peak, meaning that even his bad nights eclipsed the combined audiences of todays late-night lineup, a stark reminder that when comedy aimed to unite rather than lecture, Americans actually tuned in.
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