As Trevor Noah announces his departure from The Daily Show, everyone is asking themselves: what unfunny liberal “comedian” that few will see will take his place?
“Late-night comedy” on television has become entirely political, and politics, of course, comes from only one direction: the left.
It’s taken a real toll on the reviews. As The Post reported last week, “At its peak in 2013 with [Jon] Stewart at the helm, The Daily Show averaged 2.5 million viewers each night. During Noah’s tenure, it averaged just over 800,000 nightly viewers initially – but has since lost some of its audience, falling below the 400,000 mark at times.
Stewart was also openly leftist, but managed to treat the show as comedic education for low-information voters. This isn’t an excavation. A 2004 Pew Research Center poll found that 21% of adults under the age of 30 regularly get presidential campaign news from television comedies like The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live.
With the election of Donald Trump and the obsessive discussion of celebrities at awards shows, influencers on TikTok, and random strangers on the subway, it became much less important for a TV show to break the news to kids.
In October 2020, The New York Times accused Trump of “ruining political comedy.” The play conceded, “Maybe it’s the oversupply; In every form of humor, from sitcoms to bar remarks, overproduction causes trouble.” Yes, the boring, boring, uninteresting comedians on late-night TV were, and still are, obsessed with Donald Trump, and it has its shows actually destroyed.
Last Wednesday, to randomly pick a day, Jimmy Kimmel joked, fresh off Twitter trending after being so uncomfortably unfunny on a “Monday Night Football” segment that he hoped Trump’s rank on Forbes’ richest list would, too be his inmate number .
Jimmy Fallon, who in 2016 made the mistake of treating Trump as a regular by ruffling his hair for which he tearfully apologized, joked that perhaps Trump should help with Ukraine since he’s had so many affairs with foreigners.
Stephen Colbert called Trump a “horny cockatoo” in a joke that you really don’t need to hear because, like all of Colbert’s attempts at humor, it just isn’t funny.
Trump was joke fodder when he was president, fine, but it’s the fall of 2022. Trump hasn’t been president for almost two years, and that’s the best these ideological hirers have.
It’s not hard to see that these comedians are less for their, um, comedy and more for their politics inside the lines in these slots. Kimmel and Colbert have a fairly open, seething anger at anyone not on the left with them. And Fallon, while definitely more amiable and not as hateful of half the country, seems like he lives in fear of another onslaught for treating a political opponent like a human being. He won’t make that mistake again.
“Gutfeld!” on Fox News was a hit as the only late-night non-liberal comedy show.Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
And while the media is reporting how sad it is that the only non-white late-night host is leaving, Noah hasn’t strayed from that boring liberal orthodoxy at all.
This is partly why Greg Gutfeld’s late-night Fox News show was such a hit. As the only non-liberal late-night comedy show, “Gutfeld!” automatically has greater appeal than the same Jimmy Jimmy Stephen shows on network television. In August, it averaged 2.19 million viewers.
Gutfeld is really funny too, and his co-hosts Kat Timpf and Tyrus are hilarious too. They don’t make lame jokes about Trump or the guy who’s president right now. They are unpredictable like the rest of the late night lineup.
It’s also why Joe Rogan continues to crush the podcasting world. As a stand-up comedian, Rogan is an outspoken liberal. But he doesn’t make the same stupid Donald Trump jokes. Even his guests aren’t uniformly left as with the late-night shows. It turns out that diversity matters.
Something is happening here, but the TV producers don’t seem to want to know. The producers of these shows have a point of view, and they want that point of view to be enforced, even if it means shutting down half the country and not laughing at all.
No one waits for late night shows to be balanced or smart. But can they at least be funny sometimes?
Twitter: @Karol