Late night TV since January 20, 2017:
“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Donald Trump.”
“Donald Trump who?”
“Donald Trump who is a big, fat idiot puppet of Putin and Netanyahu who doesn’t pay taxes and drinks a dozen Diet Cokes a day while watching the Gorilla Channel on television, which his staff created, and who called Nazis fine people and told people to inject bleach to fight covid.”
The public never really bought this nonsense. Johnny Carson’s nonpartisan Tonight show drew a larger audience that the two Jimmys and Stephen Colbert combined.
In Trump’s second presidency, the audience for bashing Trump is smaller. Only 2% of the public watched the trio in 2025 and with Colbert gone, next season’s audience should be even smaller.
The cheap thrills already were gone six years ago when the New York Times Magazine reported, “How President Trump Ruined Political Comedy.
“The Trump years created a bumper crop of liberal comedy shows—almost all of which have been canceled. Why is the president so impervious to satire?”
Somehow, the paper blamed the president for the inability of comedians to make people laugh.
NYT said:
From 1996 until the second term of the George W. Bush administration, The Daily Show was effectively the only program of its kind. In 2005, The Colbert Report gave the most popular Daily Show correspondent a half-hour of his own. The boom began almost a decade later, when HBO aired the first episode of Last Week Tonight. Since January 2015, another seven liberal clip shows have premiered: Full Frontal, The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, The Opposition With Jordan Klepper, Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj, Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas, The Jim Jefferies Show and The Break With Michelle Wolf. As of today [October 7, 2020], all of those seven but Full Frontal have been canceled.
This boom and bust overlaps conspicuously with the political career of one Donald J. Trump. In theory, Trump should be the best thing that ever happened to liberal comedy. Five years ago, when he announced his candidacy after descending an escalator in a mall/apartment complex bearing his name, it briefly appeared as if he might be. Like so many others, this hope has not panned out. Maybe it’s the glut; in any form of humor, from sitcoms to barroom remarks, overproduction causes trouble. But there is also a sense, as the president talks openly about defying the results of the election, that satire has not accomplished what its champions believed it could. Even the professionals seem disillusioned. Before his show, Oliver took questions from the audience, and I asked him what comedy was like under this administration. “People say it writes itself—the worst kind of comedy,” he said. “As a human being and a comedian, I cannot wait for this to be over.”
The spin was Trump was less popular and therefore no one wanted to laugh at him.
He received 62 million votes in 2016 and would go on the receive 75 million in 2020. So much for that theory.
The Timesman never considered that the lack of talent of these mockingbirds and their writers turned viewers off. The self-importance of the hosts is a hoot. In 29 years as the Tonight show host, Johnny Carson never lectured the audience on politics or anything else. He was an entertainer first—nag last.
These guys are the opposite.
The two Jimmys and Colbert were/are frontmen—shills—for media conglomerates who promote the very globalist agenda that MAGA opposes. Fallon once mussed up Trump’s hair and had to apologize later for humanizing The Donald.
The Atlantic dusted off the NYT report from nearly 6 years ago and used the same spin. Drudge linked the story, titled, “The Trump Comedians Are Tired.
“The president’s first administration was a boon for satirists. Today, many of them are sick of the shtick.”
The comedians are not tired. They are tiresome.
And the boon was a mirage. In 2016, the total audience for the ABC, CBS and NBC late-night shows averaged 8.6 million.
By 2020, they averaged 7.6 million viewers.
Trump’s return in 2025 resulted in 5.9 million viewers.
Greg Gutfeld beat them all, averaging 3.34 million viewers, up ~21% from 2024.
Oh sure, there were plenty of similar TDS shows on HBO and the like, but they failed to last, quickly joining Chevy Chase in the trash can of late-night talk shows. The audience for anti-Trump tirades just wasn’t there despite corporate media repeating every utterance by the two Jimmys and Colbert.
They never mocked Barack Hussein Obama, but nature does. As a new school year begins, the elementary school re-named for him in Richmond, Virginia, is closed due to mold and rodents.
Predictability in comedy is not a bad thing. Most of us have seen every Three Stooges short dozens of times, the same with Bugs Bunny. We still laugh.
But a bad joke does not get funnier no matter how many times you repeat it.
The contempt became the product, and contempt is boring when it masquerades as wit. Trump gave late-night endless material, but the hosts had no acumen, no levity, no generosity, and no real comic instinct. They served the media conglomerates, repeated the administrative state’s talking points, and mistook applause from their own ideological choir for cultural relevance. The audience heard the same hackneyed sermon for nine years: Trump stupid, Trump evil, Trump dictator, Trump joke. America moved on. The comedians became the punchline.
Agree that mocking Trump bores people, but I also think a considerable number of people are alienated by the unhinged, irrational partisan attacks that are directed at Trump and his supporters.