The history of television comedy appears nearly mythical in the American mind, peopled with larger-than-life stars, cutting-edge comic wits, classic punchlines and characters, and wild behind-the-scenes legends. “Saturday Night Live” introduced the world to talents like Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Dana Carvey, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Chris Farley, Tina Fey, Phil Hartman, Norm Macdonald, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Adam Sandler, and a host of other now-household names, in addition to playing a role in popularizing comedians like Billy Crystal and Steve Martin. Late-night comedy talk shows soared to prominence, particularly under the steady hand of longtime “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson, who hosted the iconic NBC program for 30 years. Now, there is talk of the late-night television comedy era coming to an end.

Stephen Colbert, who has hosted the “Late Show” on CBS for just over a decade, was slated to leave the airwaves this week as the “Late Show” is officially shut down. The program originated in 1993 with David Letterman, who transitioned to CBS after NBC passed him over to take over the “Tonight Show” following Carson’s retirement, instead giving the position to Jay Leno, who hosted the show for nearly two decades and outperformed Carson in terms of episodes hosted. Colbert’s departure and the end of the nearly 35-year “Late Show” run has been hailed by comedians and comedy analysts alike as the end of an era. “I think of Johnny Carson’s final week. I think of Jay Leno’s first week. I think of David Letterman, his last NBC week and his first CBS week,” said Kliph Nesteroff, a self-styled standup comedian and author of “The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy,” of Colbert’s exit. “I think of all those monumental moments that have entered the canon of late-night history, and this sort of feels like it belongs with those.”

Except it isn’t really the end of an era, is it? If we’re being honest, the era of late-night television comedy ended years ago. While figures like Carson, Letterman, and Leno are considered titans of the industry, and figures like Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels could be called pioneers of the format, the whole late-night television thing has been worn out. It just isn’t funny anymore. Colbert and his fellow late-night comrades, “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon, “Late Night” host Seth Meyers, “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver, and the eponymous host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” aren’t funny for the simple reason that they are not comedians: they are propagandists.

Colbert and Kimmel are perhaps the most blatant examples of propagandists, if only because they have a higher viewership than Meyers and Oliver (who isn’t even American, by the way). Over the course of his roughly 11 years helming the “Late Show,” Colbert has extensively targeted President Donald Trump with jokes, jabs, and criticism, often casting Trump as chaotic, corrupt, and incompetent, all while trumpeting even the most insane policies of former president Joe Biden and fawning over Democratic Party politicians making guest appearances on the show. In one particularly stupid series of “sketches,” Colbert slapped some singing cartoon syringes on the screen in a musical number bid to convince Americans to take the controversial COVID-19 shot. Kimmel’s rhetoric is in a similar but nastier vein, making numerous blatant comments about assassinating Trump, smearing conservative activist Charlie Kirk in the immediate aftermath of his murder in September, and dehumanizing Republican voters as “mouth-breathers,” Nazis, and idiots generally, in addition to making repeated vulgar sexual jokes about Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and the president’s family.

Likewise, Meyers, who seems incapable of escaping his old smug, effete “SNL” spoof news anchor persona, regularly hosts a segment on “Late Night” entitled “A Closer Look,” dedicated entirely to strawmanning and eviscerating Trump administration policies, while simultaneously inviting Democratic Party politicians and candidates to essentially campaign on national television as guests on his show. Oliver, who was evidently born as a ventriloquist dummy in England, has followed suit, frequently blasting the Republican Party, Trump, and conservative positions and policies. He openly endorsed Biden in 2020 and cast Trump supporters as a threat, warning his largely progressive viewers that “more than 70 million people voted for [Trump] and everything he said and stands for, and that is something we are going to have to reckon with for the foreseeable future.” While Fallon is arguably the most even-handed and balanced of the current slate of late-night “comedy” talk show hosts, he still skews towards the Left, frequently hosting Democrats as guests and making jokes at the Right’s expense far more often than at the Left’s.

According to studies by the Media Research Center (MRC), Colbert, Kimmel, Meyers, Fallon, and “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart (Oliver’s show was not analyzed as it is hosted on HBO, not network television) targeted Trump and conservatives 92% of jokes in 2025, up 10% from the year before. A total of more than 12,000 jokes targeted Republicans and conservatives, more than 7,000 targeted Trump, and only 982 jokes took aim at Democrats and progressives, often mocking them for not opposing Trump and the GOP forcefully enough. Nearly 200 guests invited on the shows were Democrats or progressives, while only two were conservative-aligned: Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld appeared on the “Tonight Show,” Fallon’s highest-rated episode of the season, and American Compass founder and Manhattan Institute alum Oren Cass was a guest on the “Daily Show.”

While not a talk show, “SNL” has journeyed down a similar path, with incessant jokes mocking Trump and Republicans. In a recent example, from the May 17 cold open, the show’s caricature of Trump is visited by the ghost of notorious rapist and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (played with absolutely no personality by an aged Will Ferrell), who reminisces with the “SNL” Trump about sexually assaulting underage girls and grants the sketch show version of the president visions of the future, featuring ex-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem selling vacuum cleaners on the Home Shopping Network and War Secretary Pete Hegseth teaming up with FBI Director Kash Patel to chug kegs of beer and market clear liquor disguised as bottled water.

In its earliest days, late-night comedy talk shows were often centered on pop culture, with little notice given to politics. Even then, what little attention was given to political matters was often “fair and balanced.” In 1962, Jack Paar hosted conservative intellectual magnate William F. Buckley, Jr. as a guest on the “Tonight Show,” following an episode in which progressive writer and peripherally-political guest Gore Vidal mocked Buckley as a “troglodyte.” The effusively eloquent Buckley was given an opportunity to counter the effeminate Vidal’s characterization. Paar’s successor, Carson, deliberately avoided any political focus in commentary or humor, frequently inviting movie stars, musicians, authors, and prominent figures in academia, health care, and other fields as guests. He did host several Republican and Democratic politicians as guests, but Carson’s interviews generally avoided politics and focused more on the human side of the political figures, including Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.

Shows like “SNL” became popular in the 1970s and 1980s not for their politics, but for their brand of (what was at the time) “edgy” humor, cracking jokes about sex and racism in a medium where such subjects had previously been taboo, irreverently lampooning familiar social mainstays like news programs and cooking shows, and popularizing the then-burgeoning brand of absurdist humor with such goofy and off-the-wall sketches as the “Landshark” and the “Coneheads,” in addition to witty takes on more traditional humor with characters like Bill Murray’s Nick the Lounge Singer or Phil Hartman’s Anal Retentive Chef.

The social and moral order that was already disintegrating in the 1970s has now all but crumbled: sex jokes are no longer edgy, they are the banal, monotonous norm; stereotypically homosexual behavior or mannerisms are no longer fair game for snide wisecracks but are practically a sacrosanct protected characteristic; even the assassination of major political figures has become acceptable fare for “comedy” writers, so long as those political figures are conservatives. This goes beyond a matter of merely tone-policing comedy. In the 1970s and even in the 1980s, the progressive ideology coursing through mainstream media and the comedy institutions of the day was, to a certain extent, countercultural and therefore humorous at the very least because it was poking fun at the establishment and challenging societal norms. But now that that left-wing ideology is a dominant force in society, with politicians allowing transgender-identifying males to sexually assault and rape girls in sex-specific bathrooms and seemingly wantonly trampling the pro-life laws enacted in red states, such humor just isn’t humorous. It’s propaganda.

Calling Hegseth an alcoholic isn’t funny, and the joke takes no talent to come up with — in fact, it may require a seriously-depleted I.Q. to devise the joke and then determine that it’s clever enough to be aired on national television. Besides being just patently inaccurate, smearing Trump as a racist isn’t funny. You know what would be funny? A joke accusing Justice Samuel Alito of being racist, and having Alito respond with some variation of, “I’m not racist, some of my best friends are Sicilian!” But a joke of that sort will never make it onto one of the late-night “comedy” shows or “SNL” or any of its short-lived, equally-progressive mutant variations, because putting that joke on air would undermine the Left’s sometimes-unspoken maxim that all heirs of Western civilization and European Christianity are white and that all white people are inherently racist and evil.

To make a long story short (“Too late!” you say!) Colbert’s departure from the small screen does not mark the end of some mythical era of late-night comedy television; it marks the failure of the Left to weaponize comedy, for the simple fact that once it’s weaponized by the Left it’s no longer comedy: it’s propaganda, and propaganda just isn’t funny.