Free Republic

The Left's fatal humor deficit.Left-wing comedy, especially late-night shows, took another hit recently when Paramount’s CBS canceled the Late Show and its host Stephen Colbert, whose pathetic ratings were nowhere near worth the millions of dollars the show has been burning through for years. The Dems’ press-agent media, of course, have been parroting Colbert’s claim that Paramount is carrying water for President Trump, the prime target of Colbert’s juvenile, humorless insults. In reality, the show had a staff of 200, cost $100 million annually to produce, and lost $40 million a year. You don’t have to be Adam Smith to...

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show overwhelmingly catered to left-wing audiences, functioning more as a partisan “therapy” outlet than a comedy program, according to a new study from media watchdog NewsBusters. Since 2022, Colbert hosted 176 left-leaning guests and just one Republican — former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), a vocal critic of President Donald Trump. In 2025 alone, The Late Show featured 43 left-leaning guests and zero conservatives, according to the analysis. “Colbert’s show has been late-night group therapy for liberals,” NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck told New York Post. “Americans have continually shown they no longer have the time or patience...

Protesters gathered in New York City to hold a “We’re With Colbert” rally on Sunday in support of the recently canned ” The Late Show” host. The rally was held outside of the CBS Broadcast Center on Manhattan‘s West Side, according to the New York Post. The outlet noted that only around 20 people showed up to the event, with most attendees — including the New York Police Department (NYPD) officers assigned to keep the peace — leaving shortly after it began. “Our country is not perfect, never has been,” the event organizer told the outlet. The event organizer went...

With Stephen Colbert canceled, and Morning Joe in perilous straits as MSNBC is discarded by its parent company, could Joe Scarborough be making a pitch for a late-night gig? The question arises in light of Scarborough's antics and bell-ringing stunt this morning, bringing to mind a late-night host's desperate bid for laughs.Scarborough went on a rant against Tulsi Gabbard's White House briefing room appearance in which she laid out accusations against Obama in connection with Russian-collusion conspiracy claims about the 2016 election. During vaudeville days, a judge would ring a bell to remove failed acts from the stage. Claiming that...

Colbert killed comedy. Then comedy killed his show.The Late Show was born out of the desperation of CBS executives to poach David Letterman. Johnny Carson had decided to bring his unchallenged reign over late night to an end. The future of the Tonight Show was up between Jay Leno, a hard-working comic, and Letterman, the darling of media types in New York, who had the hip alternative Late Night show. NBC settled on Leno, who underwent the first of a series of bastings by the chattering classes for upstaging one of their favorite cringe comics, while CBS created the Late...

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld cheered Hunter Biden after the former president’s son went on a profanity-laced tirade, tearing into members of the Democratic establishment who he says undermined and mistreated his father toward the end of his presidency. “But Democrats, if you listen to him … what have Democrats been trying to do? All six months. Try to be authentic. They try to fake swear, do a lot of theater. That’s real swearing,” Gutfeld said after watching the interview Biden gave to YouTube personality Andrew Callaghan. “You gotta give it to him. That guy is authentic, he’s the real...

first segment - the legality of autopen pardons; second (beginning at the seven minute mark) - one family's harrowing story of the flood; third segment (beginning at the twenty minute mark) - Cruz not being tired of winning when it comes to Stephen Colbert getting canceled

After announcing the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CBS is hard at work searching for a better program to replace their old flagship. Here are ten great ideas that would be way better than The Late Show:Larry The Dying Leper: This show is just watching a man slowly die of leprosy. Way funnier!Kidney Stone Watch: 90 straight minutes of a dude trying to pass a kidney stone.That old "KaBoom" infomercial with Billy Mays on loop: Such a classic.Cemetery Cam: Nothing but a livestream from a camera at a cemetery. Big upgrade, CBS.The Ingrown Toenail Experience: Way less...

The axing of Stephen Colbert's Late Show has been received as a death knell for late-night television - but there's still time for one more rising star before the world of cable TV is eclipsed by TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram reels. CBS and its parent company, Paramount, announced that Colbert's show would 'end its historic run' in May 2026, just over a decade after it first launched, as it hemorrhaged $40 million per year. 'We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and will retire the Late Show franchise at that time,' the broadcast executives said. 'We are proud that Stephen called CBS...

A real comedian is not a barking moonbat on a soapbox. He knows his job is to entertain us, not to install our political opinions. The great Johnny Carson reminds us of better times for late night television: **VIDEO ON LINK**

“So, for the first time in history, Americans have stopped watching NBC, CBS TV, and ABC,” reported commentator Bill O’Reilly Thursday. “Their viewing level has fallen below 20 percent — unheard of.”“And it’s because they’re boring and they’re far left,” O’Reilly elaborated. “That’s the two reasons.”The latest casualty of this legacy-media collapse is notable, too.CBS is canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, effective after the 2025-’26 season.The move will end what will have been a 33-year run that began with host David Letterman in 1993. Colbert took the show’s helm in 2015, shortly after Letterman’s retirement.The news-making announcement has...

The ratings are in for the second quarter of 2025, and things remain competitive across late-night, with Stephen Colbert holding onto the top spot in his hour and Greg Gutfeld dominating his slot, and having huge gains year-on-year. According to LateNighter.com, citing Nielsen ratings, CBS’ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert topped the 11:35 pm hour in total viewers with an average of 2.417 million across 41 first-run episodes. The Late Show was also the only program to show an increase over the first quarter, with the show up 1%. In the coveted 18–49 demo, Colbert brought in 219,000 viewers....

NEW YORK, NY — Along with NPR and PBS, a state-run propaganda program hosted by Stephen Colbert announced it would be shutting down due to a loss of funding. The Late Show, filmed at the historic Ed Sullivan Theater, transitioned from late-night comedy to officially sanctioned state-run propaganda in 2015 with the hiring of Colbert. Though known for his comedic work at the time, Colbert was reportedly eager to promote government-generated information initiatives in exchange for money. "I thought maybe our ratings were down, but CBS informs me that's not why they fired me," Colbert said, addressing the cancellation on...

CBS brass say they pulled the plug on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” because of its punishing losses — pegged between $40 million and $50 million a year — and claim politics had nothing to do with it. The 61-year-old host got canned just days after he took a dig at the Tiffany Network over its $16 million settlement with Donald Trump over a controversial “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris as the network’s parent Paramount negotiates with the Trump administration regulatory approval for its $8 billion sale to independent studio Skydance. “I am offended, and I don’t know...

Stephen Colbert was receiving messages of support and affection from his fellow late-night hosts after announcing that CBS was canceling his show, “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” next May. Jimmy Fallon said he was “just as shocked as everyone,” and Seth Meyers called him a great host and comedian but an even better person. Jimmy Kimmel directed an expletive at CBS, and Andy Cohen said it was a sad day for the network. As for President Donald Trump — a frequent target of Colbert’s comedy — he said on Truth Social that “I absolutely love” that Colbert was “fired.”...

Everybody was shocked — shocked! — when Stephen Colbert announced this week that CBS canceled “The Late Show.” The despondent media reacted like a meteor was about to smash into Earth. But how surprising was Colbert’s kibosh really? Did peoples’ jaws also hit the floor when Blockbuster Video called it quits in 2014? Were they muffling their screams when blimps were phased out for air travel in 1937? “What do you mean ‘no more silent films’?!” The end of “The Late Show” was every bit as writ-in-stone as any of those predictable downfalls. And it’s not only Colbert. The Grim...

NBC late-night host Seth Meyers reacted to Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) being handcuffed after he stormed into the Department of Homeland Security’s press conference last week, claiming “This is what it looks like to live in a police state.” During Wednesday’s episode of Late Night, Meyers played a clip of Sen. Padilla claiming he was not told why he was being arrested last week, after he burst into U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press briefing, saying, “This is what it looks like to live in a police state.”

NBC’s Seth Meyers continued his lamentations on President Trump’s response to the Los Angeles riots on Wednesday’s edition of Late Night. As Meyers tells it, Congressional Republicans, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, are “collaborating” with Trump to “turn America into a military-style autocracy” and would’ve ratted out the original Tea Party to the British in 1773. Meyers was agreeing with California Gov. Gavin Newsom that the Founders would be ashamed of Trump’s actions when he went on one of his Meyers-esque digressions about what the proper term for “pants” was in the 18th century and then declared, “Now, if you’re...

Ruffin participated in a comedy bit on NBC's 'Late Night': "We have a free press so that we can be nice to Republicans at fancy dinners. That's what it says in the First Amendment."Comedian Amber Ruffin is speaking out, just a couple of days after the White House Correspondents’ Association decided to cancel her planned performance at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which is set to be held next month. Ruffin had been booked for the gig in February, with WHCA president Eugene Daniels saying at the time that “when I began to think about what entertainer would be...

Late-night hosts relentlessly made Donald Trump the focus of nearly all of their jokes before the presidential election, but failed to sway the voting, as revealed by a new study. A shocking 98 percent of the jokes made by Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and Saturday Night Live in the lead up to Election Day made Trump the butt of the joke, according to media watchdog group Media Research Center. As many as 1,428 of the 1,463 political jokes on these shows - from September 3 through October 25 - were targeted at Trump, the study found....