{"id":285966,"date":"2025-07-23T19:23:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T19:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/285966\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T19:23:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T19:23:09","slug":"i-was-a-late-night-writer-colberts-cancellation-hurts-american-comedy-and-sanity-jill-twiss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/285966\/","title":{"rendered":"I was a late-night writer. Colbert\u2019s cancellation hurts American comedy \u2013 and sanity | Jill Twiss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week \u2013 just a few days after Stephen Colbert called out his parent company for paying Donald Trump millions of dollars \u2013 CBS canceled<\/a> the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.<\/p>\n

Maybe now people will finally stop saying Trump is good for comedy.<\/p>\n

In this latest Trump administration, I often joke that I\u2019m just not cut out for being this furious all the time. I\u2019m a comedy writer. I\u2019m built for naming dogs Doctor Reginald Pancakes and writing sentences like \u201cEvery woman\u2019s deodorant is called Delicate Whisper and every man\u2019s deodorant is called Beef Shazam!\u201d I get that there\u2019s nothing more annoying than a comedian getting all serious, and yet here we are.<\/p>\n

So first, let\u2019s address the obvious: was the cancellation for political reasons or, as the network claims, for \u201cpurely financial\u201d reasons. My answer? Yes. The problem is we keep treating those like they\u2019re separate things.<\/p>\n

CBS isn\u2019t ending the show for 10 months. They could have made the announcement whenever they wanted. But they chose to tell Stephen Colbert, host of the highest-rated network late night show<\/a>, just 48 hours after he called<\/a> Paramount\u2019s payment to Trump a \u201cbig fat bribe\u201d. They chose to cancel the Peabody award-winning show in the midst of an attempt to sell Paramount to a company called Skydance, a merger that has to be approved by the Trump administration. They chose to tell Colbert they were canceling his show, one day after the CEO of Skydance met with the FCC and discussed<\/a> \u201cCBS\u2019s editorial decision-making\u201d.<\/p>\n

Basically, if the decision wasn\u2019t political, then Paramount sure is happy to let it look political, and at that point there\u2019s no meaningful difference. Whether the network canceled the Late Show to appease Trump or not, they did it knowing he\u2019d think so.<\/p>\n

CBS wants it both ways. They want the viewers to believe they\u2019re an unbiased network and they want Trump to think they\u2019ll do anything he wants.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s what I think as a human being who lives in this world right now. But, as a comedy writer who wrote for late night TV for almost a decade? Well, I can\u2019t stop thinking about the jokes. This cancellation is really sad to me because I believe in the power of jokes.<\/p>\n

Late night hosts are our way of saying: \u201cHey, this is crazy, right? RIGHT?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

True story: once a guy was mugging me and he started punching me in the face. I told a joke and he STOPPED PUNCHING ME. That is the power of jokes. (No, I will not tell you the joke. Because I\u2019d say it and then you\u2019d be all \u201cC\u2019mon, it\u2019s not that funny\u201d and then I\u2019d have to be all: \u201cNo, you had to be there. It\u2019s not as funny when you aren\u2019t punching me in the face.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The thing about jokes is that they require a shared base of knowledge. A shared reality. If I tell a joke about a commercial and you\u2019ve never seen that commercial, the joke isn\u2019t going to go over very well. Losing late night shows is one more step toward losing a shared reality, and that to me is terrifying.<\/p>\n

There is a moment every New Yorker knows. It happens when you\u2019re on the subway and someone does something particularly insane: an 83-year-old white lady raps, or a man in a three-piece suit publicly clips his toenails. And then you catch the eye of someone across the train \u2013 they raise their eyebrows and you raise your eyebrows back. And then you feel a little better. Because someone else saw what you saw and they can confirm that it\u2019s something.<\/p>\n

Late night hosts like Stephen Colbert<\/a> do that on a larger scale. They\u2019re our way of saying: \u201cHey, this is crazy, right? RIGHT?\u201d In this world of algorithmic bubbles and blatant lies and deepfakes, late night television is a place you can gather at night and say: \u201cYes, this happened and it is fucking weird.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another thing I like about jokes: the basis of jokes is truth. I\u2019ve written books, speeches, game shows and news articles and I\u2019ve never been fact-checked as hard as I was when writing late night television. Jokes just don\u2019t work if they\u2019re not based on something true.<\/p>\n

And for our leaders? The ability to take a joke matters. If our corporate overlords and representatives in government can\u2019t handle being joked about on late night TV, we don\u2019t need new shows. We need new leaders. In this current system \u2013 with a Congress and a supreme court who want nothing more than to cater to Trump\u2019s every whim \u2013 we don\u2019t have a lot of options to hold our leaders accountable. In a free society, joking about our leaders isn\u2019t just helpful or fun, it\u2019s vital.<\/p>\n

For me, this isn\u2019t just about Colbert. (I met him once. In 2014, the day Last Week Tonight with John Oliver was set to tape our first show, Colbert came to our office and went from room to room to congratulate each member of the staff and to wish us luck. It was a kind gesture that I\u2019ll long remember.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just about his staff \u2013 a couple hundred people who in my experience are thoughtful, hilarious, ridiculously competent people at the top of their game.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not even just about the humiliating weakness the television networks continue to display as the president sues them into silence.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about the jokes. We need the jokes. Because this country could really use a break from getting punched in the face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week \u2013 just a few days after Stephen Colbert called out his parent company for paying Donald…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":285967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3937],"tags":[77,382,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-285966","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114904183911978733","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/285967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}