Stephen Colbert Was Too Human for Late Night

In 2022, Dua Lipa appeared as a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and asked him about the role his faith plays in his work.

“Does your faith and your comedy ever overlap?” she asked. “And does one ever win out?”

Colbert first offers a little quip (“I think, ultimately, us all being mortal, the faith will win out in the end”) and then launches into a lengthy and eloquent treatise on how Catholic teaching has trained him to wield humor as a defense against despair.

“I’m a Christian and a Catholic, and that’s always connected to the idea of love and sacrifice being somehow related, and giving yourself to other people,” he says. “And that death is not defeat.” He goes on to explain:

And sadness is like a little bit of an emotional death, but not a defeat if you can find a way to laugh about it. Because that laughter keeps you from having fear of it, and fear is the thing that keeps you turning to evil devices to save you from the sadness. As Robert Hayden said, ‘We must not be frightened or cajoled into accepting evil as our deliverance from evil. We must keep struggling to maintain our humanity, though monsters of abstraction threaten and police us.’ So if there’s some relationship between my faith and my comedy, it’s that no matter what happens, you are never defeated. You must understand and see this in the light of eternity, and find some way to love and laugh with each other.

A thunderstruck audience breaks into applause as Lipa gamely gestures broadly and shouts “Stephen Colbert, everybody!”

It’s a remarkable moment, and the sort I’d hoped we’d get a lot more of when Colbert inherited The Late Show’s mantle in 2015. Any hopes I’d held out for Colbert getting more real more often were dashed last week when CBS and its parent company, Paramount Global, announced that The Late Show is coming to a close. The cancellation, they stressed in a statement, was “purely a financial decision” and “is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” Feel free to take their word on that if you like, but we’ll circle back to this statement in a minute.

I came of age during Colbert’s Comedy Central era, where his satirization of Bush-era neoconservatism was a tour-de-force cocktail of commentary and comedy. Even then, Colbert could occasionally surprise guests and viewers alike with Christian insight. In 2008, when Colbert Report guest Philip Zimbardo found himself backed into a theological corner during a spiritual debate, he chuckled uneasily and said, “Obviously, you learned well in Sunday School.” Colbert smirked and shot back: “I teach Sunday School, motherf*****.” He wasn’t lying.

But the strictures of network television are different from Comedy Central’s Wild West salad days, and Colbert’s public persona was steadily sanded down into a standard issue late night ringmaster. Sure, he was not a fan of President Donald Trump, but his political jokes were not appreciably more acerbic than, say, David Letterman’s Ronald Reagan jokes or Jay Leno’s Bill Clinton jokes. Colbert was transparent about his opinions, but he played it safe.

The best Colbert moments to come out this era were not political so much as personal, particularly around discussions of loss. There was his profoundly human conversation with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, where the two men shared grief over the passing of their loved ones. There was a beautiful moment where Colbert asked Keanu Reeves what happens when we die, and Reeves — after taking a beat — says: “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” And then last year, Colbert hosted the artist Nick Cave and the two had an essential conversation about the ways devastation is the thing that forms you into a “fully realized human being.”

The best Colbert moments to come out this era were not political so much as personal, particularly around discussions of loss.

Moments like these brought Colbert’s true talents to the fore, and they made for powerful television. Colbert lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was a boy, and this experience mightily shaped both his comedy and his means of connection to others. It also set him apart from his late night competition. Seth Myers could be funnier, John Oliver could be more politically incisive, and Jimmy Fallon had The Roots. But at his best, Colbert brought a deeply felt humanity to late night television, and that was enough to put him in the ratings lead.

It’s also one of the reasons people are right to be skeptical of Paramount Global’s “purely financial” claims. Paramount recently settled a lawsuit with Trump over claims that 60 Minutes “selectively” edited an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, and Colbert openly mocked the settlement as “a big, fat bribe.” Company leadership has seemed nervous about Trump’s interference in a planned upcoming merger with Skydance Media, and a cynic might wonder if canceling Colbert was a signal that Paramount is willing to play ball. Those suspicions only deepened when Trump cheered on Colbert’s cancellation on Truth Social. “I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired,” he posted Friday morning. “His talent was even less than his ratings.”

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None of this means that Paramount is lying about the “purely financial” reasons for canning the show. It’s true that late night television ratings have fallen a long way from Johnny Carson’s peak, and that the model is out of step with the streaming era. But Colbert led the late night ratings, and the decision to can the show was announced two days after his “big, fat bribe” comment. As David Graham argues in the Atlantic, CBS “no longer gets the benefit of the doubt.”

So, the loss of Colbert on late night television feels symbolic of several larger trends. The end of television as we think of it, for one; institutional capitulation — implicitly or explicitly — to Trumpism, for another. It is hard to be optimistic about where either of these trends will lead. But while I feel for the Late Night crew, I am optimistic about whatever’s next for Colbert himself. He will certainly find a new medium, and it is possible that his next act will give him the freedom to be more incisive, more furious, more curious, more human. Colbert the man was always a bit at odds with the capital-driven limitations of network television, and it might be inevitable that capital would win out in the end. But he is going out with his integrity intact, and that’s why we need him more than ever.