Stephen Colbert arrives for the PaleyFest LA screening of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, at the Dolby theatre, in Hollywood, Calif., on April 21.MICHAEL TRAN/Getty Images
While other U.S. talk-show hosts checked out or self-censored Monday, Stephen Colbert didn’t pull any (non-physical) punches and kept the political jokes coming despite pervasive pressure on progressive stand-ups to sit down and shut up after Saturday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
The Late Show host and high-minded humourist went live on CBS after the first night of the Republican National Convention, delivering an extra-long opening monologue touching on the stunning events of the weekend, which saw a gunman fire at and wound the former president at a rally.
“It feels like if you fall asleep for a second, you will miss some insane twist in this election,” Colbert said. “Fortunately, this election has made it impossible to fall asleep ever again.”
This was a pungent punchline about how Americans are once again staying up all night, doom-scrolling about politics. But nothing about Colbert’s Monday show would have been particularly remarkable if it weren’t for the fact his peers all seem to be running scared.
The sense is that commentators and comedians – especially those who have been using their pulpits to stress the threat of a second Trump term to American democracy – are afraid to have a one-liner taken out of context and be accused of playing a role in making U.S. politics the powder keg it is.
A postshooting chill was first apparent Monday when the left-leaning MSNBC news channel decided not to air its Morning Joe show and again, later in the day, when Comedy Central’s The Daily Show announced it had cancelled its first show of the week.
The latter political comedy mainstay, in fact, has retreated from a week-long plan to broadcast from Wisconsin, where the Republican National Convention is being held. It was originally to culminate in a live show hosted by Colbert’s former colleague Jon Stewart on Thursday.
On ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel was not on as host Monday, though this was part of his regular summer hiatus rather than a reaction to what happened Saturday. “All weekend, I kept wondering what Jimmy Kimmel’s going to say about this on Monday,” guest host Anthony Anderson said. “And then I was, like, oh [expletive], I am Jimmy Kimmel on Monday.”
The other late-night Jimmy – Jimmy Fallon on NBC’s The Tonight Show – was on, but he was definitely not on. The comedian once inevitably described as boyish looked exhausted and nervous as he worked his way through a monologue that, incredibly, completely omitted any mention of the weekend’s violence, unless you consider Taylor Swift swallowing a bug while performing in Milan as such.
After a couple of weak jokes about Trump’s newly picked running mate J.D. Vance’s appearance (“I didn’t realize Cabbage Patch made bearded dolls”), Fallon headed over to his desk, where he went on a barely coherent ramble about the shots he made during a golf tournament over the weekend while the Trump rally was being shot up.
On CBS, by contrast, Colbert returned to his tradition of starting the show with a sober speech from his desk rather than a monologue after a tragic event has rattled the nation. “How many times do we need to learn the lesson that violence has no role in our politics?” he asked.
He shared a childhood memory of watching assassinated politician Bobby Kennedy’s coffin “on that slow train from New York down to Washington” on a black-and-white TV in 1968 – before talking about a dangerous spate of contemporary American political violence, from “the shooting of a GOP baseball practice that seriously injured Steve Scalise to the plot to kidnap and kill Governor Gretchen Whitmer to the hammer attack that nearly killed Paul Pelosi to the horrors of Jan. 6 to this most recent attack.”
After this prerecorded speech, Colbert went live as planned and mocked the first night of the Republican National Convention in his monologue without any apparent anxiety. Indeed, his writers made a gag, instead, out of a perceived imperative to tone down any rhetoric by having Colbert hold a puppy while he lambasted Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to dismiss the classified documents case against Trump.
Colbert’s first guest was former representative Adam Kinzinger, a vocal Republican critic of Trump, who was making his second live appearance on the show – the previous one was after the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Kinzinger expressed concern that the weekend’s shooting would be used “to intimidate those around Joe Biden from trying to tell the truth about Donald Trump,” whom he described as a “threat to democracy.”
A perusal of what was on other television channels that day suggested he was right to be concerned, and it’s not just politicians who are intimidated.