Politics

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’ve never seen that commercial, the joke isn’t 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.

There is a moment every New Yorker knows. It happens when you’re 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 – 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’s something.

Late night hosts like Stephen Colbert do that on a larger scale. They’re our way of saying: “Hey, this is crazy, right? RIGHT?” In this world of algorithmic bubbles and blatant lies and deepfakes, late night television is a place you can gather at night and say: “Yes, this happened and it is fucking weird.”

Here’s another thing I like about jokes: the basis of jokes is truth. I’ve written books, speeches, game shows and news articles and I’ve never been fact-checked as hard as I was when writing late night television. Jokes just don’t work if they’re not based on something true.

I don't mean to beat the Colbert drum (and, trust me, I'm perhaps posting 5% of what I run into about this imbroglio), but what this cancellation suggests is very, very dark for the media.