Jay Leno recently earned praise from MAGA media figures for hearkening back to a simpler era of television, pining for the day when late-night comedians were equal-opportunity offenders, gently poking at both sides of the political aisle.
“Why shoot for just half an audience all the time? You know, why not try to get the whole? I mean, I like to bring people into the big picture,” he told David Trulio of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in an interview posted July 22.
But in lamenting the anti-Trump sentiments coming from the likes of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel, the former “The Tonight Show” host and his recipe to Make Late-Night Great Again reveals an obliviousness to how the world has changed when it comes to media and politics: more content chasing a highly fragmented audience that increasingly finds news and entertainment within their own ideological silos.
To be fair, Leno wasn’t directly addressing CBS’ cancellation of “The Late Show” when he made his widely circulated comments, since the interview was conducted prior to that decision. Leno was nevertheless cheered by the right when the remarks surfaced, on programs such as “Fox & Friends” and “The Five,” for telling Trulio that comics “wind up cozying too much to one side or the other.”
The assertion that late-night comedy has become too political also received a robust workout on Fox News this month, after Jimmy Fallon hosted Fox’s resident jester Greg Gutfeld on Aug. 7, for a light-hearted segment devoid of politics. Ever since, Gutfeld and his colleagues used that appearance to celebrate Fallon, bash the other late-night hosts and gloat about “Late Show’s” demise.
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For the more than two decades that Leno hosted “The Tonight Show,” keeping your personal politics a mystery was considered a smart move as broadcast TV dominated viewership. It’s a tightrope act his predecessor, Johnny Carson, also walked for his 30 years on late-night television.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, however, the political climate changed, while broadcasting’s power gradually faded. By the time Donald Trump entered politics a decade ago, the major networks were shrinking into more of a niche business.
Leno’s perspective ignores the reality that media has gotten far more fragmented, with everything from TikTok to social media feeds and streaming services competing against traditional broadcast and cable networks. In this era where reaching any audience is the goal, doing so by sacrificing the “other half” is a perfectly smart strategy.
Put another way: Leno’s “down the middle” formula expired not long after he left “The Tonight Show,” and going after a segment of the audience with a distinct spin is a perfectly viable business model.
It’s equally hard to blithely accept Trump and his acolytes decrying political polarization in late-night TV when his actions have done so much to divide American society, in many ways forcing people to choose sides.
In the pre-Trump era, comedians had seen the value — or sense of civic duty — in tackling key issues, but Trump’s unprecedented grab for power, including dispatching National Guard troops to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., has altered the calculus in terms of what comics can overlook if they have any desire to address the political moment.
As for the commercial rationale for taking a stand, just ask Fox News and the highly opinionated Gutfeld, who has understandably crowed about his ratings topping Colbert and the rest of the late-night comedy field. (The achievement does warrant an asterisk, since “Gutfeld!” has the advantage of coming on at 10 p.m. ET, when more people are generally up and watching.)
The irony is those praising Leno’s comments on Fox regularly sacrifice a big chunk of the audience too, just as their counterparts at MSNBC do. Nor should it be lost that the least-watched major cable news network, CNN, seeks to straddle the elusive middle as Leno counseled.
Leno didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The most vanilla-flavored current late-night host, Leno’s successor Jimmy Fallon, attracts fewer viewers than Colbert, with the two averaging 2.4 million and 1.2 million viewers, respectively, during second-quarter 2025. But on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, Fallon’s concerted effort to create viral content with his celebrity guests has resulted in numbers that have dominated the competition.
That would be the same Jimmy Fallon who treats politics gingerly, revels in silly viral videos and who memorably drew the ire of the left in 2016 by yukking it up with Trump during his first presidential run and playfully tousling his hair.
Jimmy Fallon tousled Donald Trump’s hair in a 2016 “The Tonight Show” appearance during his first presidential run. (NBC)
Fast-forward to 2025, and Fallon is the subject of Gutfeld’s continued praise for having the “guts” to book him as a guest. “Greg’s ‘Tonight Show’ Appearance Triggers the Left” read the chyron on Gutfeld’s show, though even he admitted the griping amounted to a handful of tweets assembled as clickbait stories.
Like his Fox colleagues, Gutfeld’s criticism of Colbert and Kimmel for adopting a political point of view overlooks the many who have thrived commercially by doing precisely that.
“The Five’s” resident one-on-four liberal, Jessica Tarlov, was shouted down as usual when she said, “We are in a very different political time than when Leno was doing this,” with Gutfeld insisting his show is a success because of “the arrogance and ego” of liberal comedians, which explained why people watched him.
The words Gutfeld conveniently omitted are “like-minded people,” which underscores where Leno gets it wrong: Shooting for “half an audience” makes sense, because trying to please everybody risks leaving you in a comedy no-man’s land that pleases nobody. And while it’s slightly misleading to lump “Gutfeld!” in with traditional late-night comedy — it’s basically just a Fox panel show with extra jokes — the host and his fawning guests notably made a point last week of attributing his success, in part, to appealing to those turned off by anti-Trump humor elsewhere.
To the extent Gutfeld’s argument is that his show has flourished as a reaction to Colbert and Kimmel’s liberal tilt, Jon Stewart would agree. On his “The Weekly Show” podcast, Stewart noted that Gutfeld is “not popular because he’s a both-sides guy,” while calling out the hypocrisy of those who support Gutfeld mixing comedy and politics while decrying what Colbert does, saying they are “trying to police and create rules that they would never follow.”
It’s worth noting the late-night personality that Colbert, Kimmel and their contemporaries most admired wasn’t Leno, but his rival David Letterman, whose political material became much more pointed and partisan in his later years on CBS, before handing the keys to Colbert in 2015.
Kamala Harris on “The Late Show” with host Stephen Colbert (CBS)
Asked by The Hollywood Reporter about Leno’s remarks, HBO’s John Oliver began by saying he would “take a hard pass on taking comedic advice from Jay Leno,” before expounding on why his bigger-tent theory doesn’t work: “Comedy can’t be for everyone. It’s inherently subjective.” Oliver added that it’s “completely legitimate” to play to a broad audience or a narrow one, “because I don’t think comedy is prescriptive in that way. It’s just what people want.”
Plenty of people still want what Colbert, Kimmel and Stewart have to offer, at least by today’s standards, and many of them are insanely loyal. It’s another matter whether that justifies continuing to produce those programs, which lack the shelf-life and repeatability that’s conducive to streaming — bottom-line factors that CBS cited as its rationale for dropping “The Late Show,” even if many remain skeptical that was the only reason.
Then again, despite Gutfeld’s endorsement of Fallon, even his innocuous brand of comedy has irked Trump, who said in July that Fallon and Kimmel have “absolutely no talent” and would soon be dropped as well. That’s because for all the defenses used to explain Trump’s more outlandish pronouncements, the president clearly has no sense of humor about jokes made at his expense.
So memo to Leno: If you were hosting “The Tonight Show” now the way you did 20 years ago, guess what? You’d occupy a shrinking center that would deprive you of loyal viewers, and Trump and his supporters would still call you a no-talent hack while urging NBC to fire you, too.
