Stephen Colbert declares ‘gloves are off' as cancelled Late Show host takes aim at Trump
Colbert, the top-rated late-night talk show host in the US, said last week on his CBS show Late Night – which he took over from David Letterman in 2015 – that Paramount's decision to pay a $16m settlement to Trump over another flagship CBS show, 60 Minutes, amounted to a 'big fat bribe'. CBS is part of Paramount, which needs the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission to approve its $8bn sale to Skydance.
Paramount pulled the plug three days later, with Trump revelling in the firing of one of his most prolific detractors, posting on his Truth Social platform: 'I absolutely love that Colbert was fired.'
Colbert came out swinging on Monday, telling Trump to 'go fuck yourself'.
He joked that it had always been his dream to have a sitting president celebrate the end of his career.
'They're pointing out that last Monday, just two days before my cancellation, I delivered a blistering monologue in which I showed the courage to have a moustache,' he joked.
'I mean, obviously, CBS saw my upper lip and boom, cancelled. Coincidence? Oh, I think not. This is worse than fascism. This is stachism.'
In an anonymous leak over the weekend, CBS had appeared to suggest the Late Show lost $40m-$50m last year. Colbert joked that he could account for losing $24m annually. 'Where would Paramount have possibly spent the other $16m?' he joked. 'Oh yeah.'
In a gesture of solidarity, Colbert's fellow late-night show hosts – Last Week Tonight's John Oliver, Late Night's Seth Meyers and The Daily Show's Jon Stewart – all showed up for a joke in Monday night's episode. They were joined by other entertainers and journalists including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Weird Al Yankovic, Andy Cohen, Anderson Cooper, Adam Sandler and Christopher McDonald.
Meanwhile Stewart, who gave Colbert his late-night start in the 1990s, issued a blistering attack of his own. On Monday's episode of The Daily Show – which is also part of Paramount – Stewart lambasted its decision to cancel Colbert's show.
'The fact that CBS didn't try to save their No 1 rated late-night franchise that's been on the air for over three decades is part of what's making everybody wonder,' Stewart said on his Comedy Central program. 'Was this purely financial, or maybe the path of least resistance for your $8bn merger?'
He added: 'If you believe – as corporations or as networks – that you can make yourselves so innocuous that you can serve a gruel so flavourless that you will never again be on the boy king's radar … Why would anyone watch you? And you are fucking wrong.'
Stewart then led a choir and the audience in a chant of 'go fuck yourselves', directed at corporations who bent the knee to Trump.
Over on The Tonight Show, host Jimmy Fallon noted that viewers were planning to boycott the network over the decision. 'CBS could lose millions of viewers, plus tens of hundreds watching on Paramount+,' he joked.
On air, Colbert was visibly moved after his guest, the actor Sandra Oh, proclaimed a 'plague on CBS and Paramount,' paying tribute to his work speaking truth to power while staying funny.
Skipping a promised question-and-answer session after the taping of Monday's show, Colbert told his studio audience, 'I was nervous coming out here,' and added: 'I will miss you.'
Outside the headquarters of The Late Show, which is taped at midtown Manhattan's Ed Sullivan Theater, protesters held placards that said: 'Colbert Stays! Trump Must Go!'
Audience member Elizabeth Kott, a 48-year-old high school teacher, called Colbert's firing 'terrible'.
'It's really awful that it's come to that in this country, where companies feel the need to obey in advance. It's really awful,' she told AFP.
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