There was a show of late-night solidarity on Monday night, as The Late Show host Stephen Colbert’s comrades rallied behind him after CBS said it was cancelling his program in 2026.
Thursday’s announcement was met with shock, as well as harsh criticism that it was indicative of the network and its parent company Paramount Global bowing to U.S. President Donald Trump, over his claims that its current affairs program 60 Minutes selectively edited an interview with his 2024 election rival Kamala Harris.
Colbert has been highly critical of Trump for years, and panned the company for agreeing to a $16-million US settlement with the president earlier this month — which he said was paid to him today, though the money is to be allocated to his future presidential library.
Both CBS and Colbert announced the news on Thursday, but Colbert took the opportunity in Monday night’s opening monologue to question the motivation for the decision.
He joked that “cancel culture had gone too far,” but said he could now share his “unvarnished” opinions of Trump.
“I don’t care for him,” Colbert joked about the president, who was a Late Show guest during his first election campaign in 2015, which was also Colbert’s inaugural year on the program.
The host addressed his own “blistering” critique of the settlement, which he had made on air days before the cancellation was announced. Though he didn’t explicitly tie the two events together, he questioned how it could possibly be a “financial decision” when his program was the top rated in the late-night category.
He recognized the network’s potential constraints — especially following the multimillion-dollar payout — but also mentioned how Trump, in a post on Truth Social, celebrated the show’s cancellation.
“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” Trump wrote. “His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the moron on NBC who ruined the once-great Tonight Show.”
Colbert’s response to Trump on Monday night: “Go f–k yourself.”
WATCH | Colbert addresses CBS ‘killing off’ his show in opening monologue:
Stewart savages CBS, Trump
Aside from Colbert, The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart had the harshest comments for CBS.
He admitted late-night TV was struggling: “We’re all basically operating a Blockbuster kiosk inside of a Tower Records,” he joked.
But he said CBS “lost the benefit of the doubt” after the settlement, which others at the network and across the industry have criticized and tied to Paramount Global’s pending merger with movie and TV studio Skydance.
“Was this purely financial or maybe the path of least resistance to your $8-billion [US] merger?” said Stewart, adding that Paramount Global also owns the network he works for, Comedy Central.
WATCH | Stewart slams CBS in Daily Show monologue (Contains profanity):
“But understand this. Truly, the shows that you now seek to cancel, censor and control — a not-insignificant portion of that $8-billion value came from those f–king shows,” he said before leading a chorus of “go f–k yourself” aimed at companies, advertisers and law firms that “bend the knee” to Trump.
Questions are swirling over whether the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show was politically motivated or purely financial. Colbert alluded to a ‘bribe’ tied to a Trump lawsuit and a corporate deal.
A little love from Letterman?
Colbert first dipped his toes into the late-night waters alongside Stewart on The Daily Show from 1999 to 2005, before launching his own Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, which ran for 10 years. He eventually landed his current gig after the original Late Show host, David Letterman, retired.
Though Letterman has not made any official statement, he appeared to take a stance on Monday.
A 20-minute video appeared on his YouTube channel, with a montage of clips featuring him mocking CBS on Late Show with David Letterman over the years.
Letterman launched the venerable talk show in 1993, moving to CBS from NBC, where he had hosted Late Night with David Letterman, airing after The Tonight Show for 11 years.
WATCH | Letterman mocks CBS over the years:
Over at NBC, Jimmy Fallon joked Monday night that he was still the host of The Tonight Show, “at least for tonight.”
Fallon applauded Colbert’s run as Late Show host, but took a lighter tone, joking that boycotts could cause CBS to lose millions of viewers, as well as “tens of hundreds watching on Paramount Plus.”
Host Jimmy Kimmel is currently on summer break from his show on ABC, although he reacted to the situation on Instagram last week, saying, “F–k you and all your Sheldons CBS,” referencing the character Sheldon Cooper on the CBS sitcoms The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon.
Colbert got no love, however, from one top-rated late-night (late-evening, really) host: Fox News Channel’s Greg Gutfeld, whom Trump praised in his post celebrating the Colbert cancellation, and who hosts the show Gutfeld!
Gutfeld dismissed claims that Colbert was being censored, saying CBS is “free to fire someone who’s stinking up a market like they took a dump in the produce section.”
He also touted that his show draws higher ratings than Colbert’s (though this could also be because his show airs about an hour and a half before the major late-night programs).
It should come as little surprise that Gutfeld, a right-wing comedian and commentator, took swipes at Colbert, as Fox News Channel is generally favourable to Trump.
But as Stewart noted in his rant, Trump is also suing Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp owns both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, over the latter publication’s story about a crude letter the president purportedly wrote in 2003 to the now-deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
CBS is cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert after 33 years on air. Host Stephen Colbert made the announcement to the audience at a taping on Thursday, just days after he spoke out against Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS.
