Late Night's Last Laugh

Two weeks ago, when Paramount cancelled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” insiders in Hollywood and Washington alike deemed the move suspicious: Colbert had just called his parent company’s payout to Trump a “big fat bribe” on air. Paramount, for its part, claims that the decision was purely financial—Colbert’s show is losing forty million dollars a year. But both the political and economic explanations reveal how the landscape of late night has changed since Johnny Carson’s day. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider Colbert’s body of work and the state of the genre more generally, from the so-called late-night wars of the nineties through to the modern challenge of making comedy in a country where nothing feels funny anymore. “Late-night hosting is an art, but it’s also business. So, if your job is to get as many eyeballs on you as is humanly possible, what do you do?” Schwartz says. “It’s not easy to have fun with the news, as it is. And if you are having fun with it, something may very well be wrong.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Strangers with Candy” (1999–2000)
“The Daily Show” (1996–)
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” (2015–26)
“The Staying Power of the ‘S.N.L.’ Machine” (The New Yorker)
“Lessons from ‘Sesame Street’ ” (The New Yorker)
“The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” (1962–92)
“David Letterman’s Revolutionary Comedy,” by Emily Nussbaum (The New Yorker)
“The Colbert Rapport,” by Emily Nussbaum (The New Yorker)
“Carpool Karaoke” (2017–23)
“What the Cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ Means,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)
“After Midnight” (2024–25)

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Critics at Large is a weekly discussion from The New Yorker that explores the latest trends in books, television, film, and more. Join us every Thursday as we make unexpected connections between classic texts and pop culture.