Long Live Stephen Colbert

A personal history about late night

The President doesn’t believe in God but he believes in television. It is his church, and the talking heads on FOX are his clergy. It is his source of truth and strength and salvation. He was forged on television — it’s where he came into public consciousness and it’s how he became president. It is the force that gives him meaning, and it is the force that he fears most.

The President cannot take a joke. I know this, because he blocked me on Twitter after I made fun of him in a recurring bit back when Twitter existed and he was on it free-associating his feelings in all caps. The Knight Foundation, without my involvement though I appreciate them taking on the free speech cause, had to sue him to get him to unblock me.

The President watches Late Night and he cares about what all the Network Men in Suits say about him. They get under his fucking skin. I know this — we all know this — because he mentions them frequently, often in real time on his own social media site he invented so that nobody could make fun of him on it. When my former boss, mensch of the world Jimmy Kimmel to whom I owe my life, made fun of him during the Oscars, Trump posted a tirade about him, and gave Jimmy one of the most beautiful surprise gifts imaginable to a comedian with a live audience.

Yesterday, the President was responsible for firing Stephen Colbert, and the over 200 people who work at The Late Show, which is currently the number one network late night show in its time slot.

As I have mentioned in this newsletter and to anyone I have ever met, I briefly worked for Stephen Colbert.

In 2006, after watching Colbert eviscerate then-President George W. Bush at the White House Press Correspondents Dinner, I dropped out of college to intern at the Colbert Report.

There, I met a group of delightful nerds, many of whom would be promoted through the ranks all the way to the writers room at The Late Show, all helmed by one of the kindest and funniest men I have encountered in my professional and personal life.

There are comedians who seem slap-happy and are secretly dark child monsters, and there are comedians who are a wellspring of silliness and joy from a core of profound brilliance. Colbert is the latter. Anyone who has interacted with him for more than a passing hello will confirm this.

I started as an intern answering phones and re-stocking the writers’ cereal boxes with the reverence of a papal servant. Then, a few weeks into the internship, the 2007 WGA strike shut down the whole show until Stephen decided he’d keep the lights on for everyone and do the show himself. While the writers marched, Stephen would ensconce himself in his office with producers and researchers and graphics guys and everyone else necessary to the production of that night’s show, and then head down to the studio and deliver an excellent damn show to the waiting audience. It was Maestro work. And he did it while being very, very kind to people around him.

As the internshop went on, I ended up filling in for his personal assistant the week his book I Am America (And So Can You) came out, and even though he was juggling NPR interviews and book signings and an appearance on, prophetically, Letterman, he was unfailingly genial? He chit chatted? He asked about my day? He did…bits with me that delight me to this day? I was a scared college kid who twice accidentally disconnected a phone call from someone important, but I was treated as a person, not a cog in the service of his great show machine. That kindness is more enduring to me than any joke he told.

For all the bullshit of the entertainment industry, Stephen Colbert is an anomaly: He is someone who truly likes people. He is a natural interviewer because even when he is at top-of-his-mind funny, he is invested in the genuine moment. And friends who work and write for him now can attest, he is deeply and personally invested in the wellbeing of the people who work for him. When he spoke about the cancellation on air last night, he didn’t talk about freedom of speech or his own voice or lofty ideals about preserving the truth: He spoke about the 200 people on his staff who make that show work every night.

To kill a late night show is to kill a universe of creative livelihoods in an already faltering entertainment industry. The props department, the editors, the craft service team, the field producers, the crew — Stephen Colbert recognizes that he’s the head of an entire organism, and his announcement on the air was a tribute to the people who give it life.

To kill a late night show is also to kill an enormous platform for speaking truth to power. The men in the suits who interview network stars are also, I believe, vital satirists who shape how millions of Americans absorb the day’s news. At 11:30 every weeknight, about 2 and a half million people listen to what Stephen Colbert has to say just before their Ambien kicks in. I believe the project of network late night television like Colbert’s and Kimmel’s isn’t to craft a once-weekly, Peabody-winning comedic editorial deep dive on a national issue for prestige viewing. It’s to use that huge platform to make tangible, incremental ideological change through satire dressed up in a nice suit. It’s to hope that maybe someone who stayed up after the evening news will hear the news reflected back at them through an ideological lens that is openly critical of the president. And that gets through to them.

There is no benefit of any doubt that CBS fired Colbert for speaking out against their parent company Paramount’s $16 million appeasement payment to Donald Trump after he filed a bullshit lawsuit alleging rigged election coverage. In his monologue three nights ago, Colbert called the payment a “big, fat bribe” and called out Paramount for trying to get the Trump administration to approve the sale of the network to David Ellison’s media company Skydance. He quoted an article that wrote once Skydance buys CBS, the network put pressure on “frequent Trump critic Stephen Colbert.” It’s nauseating to watch the monologue now, with him grinning in the studio lights. When he was reading the prompter he was reading the warrant for his show’s own execution.

No reasonable person — no matter how inside or outside the entertainment industry — can argue the top performing late night now in its time slot that just earned a slew of Emmy nominations and serves as a tentpole for the studio’s publicity tour juggernaut deserves to be cancelled for any reason other than retribution.

This is a political era marked by similarly outrageous displays of flagrant, unchecked political vendettas. This government and its loyal deputies are disappearing campus protesters into unmarked vans for being a bit too vocal about their politics. Why would their indebted network heads not do the same to Colbert? And now that Trump has posted triumphantly about the cancellation and threatened Kimmel, will ABC and Disney cave next? How many institutions more hallowed than talk shows will fall to protect a very thin-skinned man who will stop at nothing to censor what people say about him on television?

Back in my dorm room in 2006, crowded around someone’s laptop watching Colbert host the White House Press Correspondent’s Dinner, I remember the joke that radicalized me.

Standing at a podium a shoe’s throw away from Bush, Colbert said: “The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing on Wednesday as he did on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.”

Bush grimaced. The crowd tittered. Colbert looked directly at the president and smiled. The jester slayed the king.

As a comedy writer and conflict-averse coward, I believe jokes are an effective tool for speaking truth to power. Shakespeare knew this. King Lear’s jester, “the Fool,” says to the mad king after mocking him to his face:

They’ll have me whipped for speaking true,

Thou'lt have me whipped for lying,

And sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace.

For Colbert, this bore out on CBS last night. May he find a new, bigger, better place to speak true. For his audience’s sake and for America’s.