I met David Letterman twice. Once when he first began his show, walking up 53rd Street. Such an approachable guy. And once again, after he’d left, at a Starbucks in my apartment building.
He said he remembered meeting me 30 years ago. Of course, he was kidding.
I love Dave, and was sad to see him go, and let out a meh when Stephen Colbert was named to replace him. But Colbert grew on me, and I find myself not only sad about his exit, but angry about it too.
CBS will tell you it was a business decision. Paramount will parrot that. The numbers, they’ll say. The shrinking late-night audience. The economics of a changing media landscape. Don’t believe a word of it.
I spent 30 years in corporate PR, and when they lay it on thick about all the reasons Colbert was cancelled, and The Late Show franchise with it, they are lying through their teeth. They cover one falsity with another, desperate to bury the truth.
Stephen Colbert didn’t lose his show because of the bogus claims by CBS. Donald Trump took it away from him, and away from us.
In doing so, Trump continues his systematic destruction of the one thing Americans have always used to survive their darkest political moments: the joke.
It really doesn’t need to be said, but Donald Trump is not funny. Not in any way that matters. He thinks he’s funny, like he thinks he’s always right, like he’s the greatest president, like he won in a landslide, like the Iran war will be over soon. If Trump thinks he’s funny, that’s a lie too.
Every president in modern memory has understood that self-deprecating humor is a form of leadership. It signals humanity, from the Irish wit of Reagan and Biden to the humor of every president in between.
My grandfather, the funniest person I ever met, said having a sense of humor was a sign of intelligence.
He was right. Trump’s lack of wit only validates his dim-wittedness.
Trump does not make fun of himself. Ever. His humor is a weapon aimed at people he despises. Reporters are “dummies” and “piggies.” His enemies are vermin, scumbags, or simply scum. Everything he does is not a setup for a punchline, but an actual punch in the face.
Think about the past few months. ICE raids tearing apart communities. January 6 insurrectionists eligible to be compensated from Justice Department funds. Death and destruction involving Iran and Venezuela. Casual talk of “wiping out” civilizations and bombing places back to the Stone Age.
Trump doesn’t calm fears. He eggs them on and feeds off them. Trump is constitutionally — pun intended — incapable of that.
So into that void step the late-night hosts. And now one of the best of them is gone.
Colbert was never just doing jokes. In my view, he was performing a public service, taking the daily avalanche of outrage and turning it into something bearable through laughter.
Late-night television used to be a war, with networks circling each other and hosts competing. Since Colbert’s exit was announced, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon have come together, recognizing the ironic seriousness of the moment.
And speaking of irony, we lost Barney Frank this week too. I keep coming back to that.
Frank was perennially the funniest person on Capitol Hill. He was brilliantly, bitingly funny. Arguably, his sense of humor helped make his coming out in the late 1980s more palatable and accepted.
I observed that from experience. I was always the class clown, the funniest guy in the room. I knew I was gay underneath, and when I came out, it was my humor people cited first. “You’re the funniest person I know,” was the standard response.
I say that with undiluted humility.
That’s why, as someone with humor, I’m unusually sad for another reason. There are no funny politicians anymore. Nobody in Washington is laughing. Everyone is pointing, accusing, outraged, and that includes Democrats, who have caught enough of Trump’s disease to forget how to be warm, how to invite people in.
Even Obama recently said Democrats need to stop being so easily offended over accidental slights and remember that people ultimately want to enjoy their lives.
As he put it, they need to stop being a “buzzkill.”
Trump has made the atmosphere of American political life airless, joyless, and mean.
Colbert’s exit isn’t about television. It’s about a president who has made it professionally dangerous to mock him. That’s why a mentalist was chosen to perform at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump didn’t want anyone telling jokes about him.
Because he is ridiculous, and he knows it, and he cannot bear for anyone else to know it too.
We used to be able to laugh at our leaders, but not in the way we laugh at Trump, because there is no humor around him. We laugh at a buffoon who is subversively crushing our sense of humor.
This week Barney Frank, who knew wit was a form of wisdom, left us. And Stephen Colbert, who knew the monologue was a form of resistance, was pushed out the door.
The mood is heavy. It starts at the top, with a killjoy of a man who has never once laughed at himself, and who would rather America be full of fear than full of laughter.
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