Comedy cop Alex Christy was quite excited to see Stephen Colbert go — even though it gives him less to hate-watch — and on the occasion of Colbert’s final show, he bade a snide farewell in a May 22 post:
Stephen Colbert began the final episode of CBS’s The Late Show by unwittingly highlighting how it all went wrong. Colbert told the audience that he viewed his show as “the joy machine” and that he thought his job was to “feel the news with you,” even if it was not actually that joyful. Later, during a sci-fi skit about the show being sucked into a black hole, Colbert was joined once againby his fellow late night hosts who suggested the black whole—that was actually green—was President Trump.
Colbert began the show by declaring, “Folks, we have done over 1,800 of these shows, and most nights I come out here and I talk to the audience beforehand, and tonight I thought I’d talk to the audience in here and the audience out there at home. This show, I want you to know and you to know, has been a joy for us to do for you. In fact, we call this show the joy machine, all right?…We call it the joy machine because to do this many shows, it has to be a machine.”
While The Late Show was not joyful to those who were on the receiving end of Colbert’s profane rantings, Colbert insisted that “On night one of The Colbert Report, back in the day, I said anyone can read the news to you, I promise to feel the news at you. And I realized pretty soon in this job that our job over here was different. We were here to feel the news with you.”
That was not Colbert’s job. To say a comedian’s job is to be funny is not particularly insightful because it says nothing about how to be funny. Yet, it is still more helpful than saying a comedian’s job is to help people process their political feelings. Today, comedy-seeking consumers don’t need to rely on the broadcast networks like they once did and Colbert’s desire to turn The Late Show into Liberal Therapy Hour contributed to the show’s demise.
Christy hated that Colbert didn’t slavishly peddle right-wing talking points the way he demanded. He concluded the post by whining:
All TV shows eventually get sucked into the black hole, but Colbert accelerated his own downfall because his real black hole was the combination of the nature of television in 2026 and poor comedic choices.
Christy also whined in behalf of his employer against Colbert in another post:
Stephen Colbert was well into his farewell media tour when he told GQ, “I think I’m more conservative than people think.” However, according to an aggregation of previous NewsBusters studies and quote packages, that is far from true. Since NewsBusters began counting jokes in January 2023, 87 percent of Colbert’s political jokes have targeted conservatives. Likewise, since September 2022, more than 99 percent of his political guests have been liberals.
MRC President David Bozell said in a statement, “Good riddance to Colbert’s nightly group therapy session for progressive elitists who could not understand why half the country kept rejecting their worldview.”
Christy then delved into his partisan joke count:
Over the span of the final 458 Late Show episodes on CBS since January of 2023, NewsBusters logged 8,553 political jokes. Of these, Colbert told 7,480 (87 percent) about conservatives, 934 (11 percent) about liberals, and 139 (2 percent) about nonpartisan people or organizations.
Colbert’s top ten most joked about people included only one Democrat. The top ten were Donald Trump (3,640), Joe Biden (339), George Santos (269), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a Republican (208), Republicans (180), JD Vance (151), Pete Hegseth (146), Elon Musk (143), Kristi Noem (106), and Rudy Giuliani (104).
[…]Then there’s the attitude. Colbert’s jokes about Republicans tended to be harsher than his ones about Democrats such as when he celebrated Trump being indicted, “Here in New York it was 40 degrees, but I still ate ice cream out of a baseball helmet. Why? Oh, just a little something worth celebrating today because literally three minutes before I walked out on this stage here, the New York Times reported a New York grand jury voted to indict former President Donald J. Trump. Oh! Oh! Come on! Come on! Thank you! Ladies and gentlemen! It’s right, he was– ladies and gentlemen, he was right, we’re finally saying Merry Christmas again.”
Christy whined further that Colbert “could also throw around a Nazi analogy as easily as any MS NOW host” — but failed to disclose that his employer’s default insult for people it disagrees with is “digital brownshirts” — a Nazi-inspired term. That hypocrisy undercuts Christy’s criticism of Colbert.
Christy concluded by huffing
Colbert’s fans lamented his downfall by claiming he was a man who spoke truth to power. They cited his battles with Trump, and before that, with George W. Bush. As different as the two presidents can be, the one thing they have in common is that they are both Republicans, and nobody ever praised Colbert for speaking truth to power when it came to Barack Obama or Joe Biden.
Has Christy or any of his MRC co-workers spoken truth to power by criticizing Donald Trump? Not likely — instead, they attacked those who criticized him, like Colbert, and failed to explain why a Republican president must be held immune from criticism.