Are We Too Late for Late Night?

It’s 2021 and I’m at a Late Show taping, sitting in the mezzanine between my stand-up comedian dad and my improv-teacher mom. Both of them fidget in anticipation of Stephen Colbert.  My dad entered the ticket lottery every day leading up to their trip. They’re visiting New York City because he has a cruise ship job (nine shows in five days) out of the Manhattan Port, and it just so happens to coincide with my own solo show playing in some dusty theater downtown. 

As a comedian steps out to warm up the crowd before the show, my dad assesses him: “That’s Paul Mercurio. I knew him back in the day at the Comic Strip.”  My mom tests out her laugh, making sure she’s camera-appropriate. I run into a comedy friend from my old improv team at The PIT (our group breakup ten years ago is still the most dramatic text thread I’ve ever been part of). Comedy is my parent’s whole life. It’s mine too. 

Now, The Late Show is cancelled. The network says the reason is purely financial, but a closer look suggests Colbert’s unrelenting criticism of our thin-skinned president—while CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, tries to finalize an $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media, requiring federal approval. The censorship of late-night talk shows contradicts their history. Late night has always been political. The very first one, The Pepsodent Show, opened with Bob Hope’s political observational monologue. The political comedy even pre-dates celebrity interviews. Late night has long been a stage for critiques of America from exciting new comedic voices…but now those voices are being censored. 

When The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was canceled, my parents were the first people I thought of. Then I thought of the late-night writers I met across from the Union Square AMC on the picket line during the writers’ strike. I thought of my friends who gained real visibility from their late-night stand-up debuts, the writers who got their start as PAs in the Rockefeller Center studios, the young comics grinding at open mics hoping to climb the comedy ladder to a talk show gig. I thought of my grandma, who calls me every time Jimmy Kimmel “really got those righties good.” I thought when a bunch of us went to a bar after getting rejected from the Late Night Writers packets—and how one of us didn’t get a rejection, and just like that, their life changed. 

Comedy is an ecosystem. The various institutions, on stage and on screen, are vital to each other. There is no UCB without local open mics. No open mics without the Comedy Cellar. No cellar without The Tonight Show. No Tonight Show without SNL. (Well, there will always be SNL.) Comedy people need places to go. Venues to aspire to. We need new audiences to find our work and laugh. 

Comedy isn’t just a balm in hard times or a tool to challenge the status quo—it’s also an industry. One that thrives on a comedian’s ability to hold a mic and spin their beliefs into something entertaining. When comedy is censored, the whole ecosystem suffers. It throws the future (which, if you don’t remember, I have seen) into question. The cancellation of The Late Show is a sign: the comedy world is shrinking. Criticism of power is being penalized. When networks become risk-adverse, the people hit the hardest are the up-and-coming comics who have fewer platforms, and more pressure to dilute their voices. It’s harder than ever to build a sustainable career in comedy when opportunities are disappearing. And censorship makes comedy fucking boring. 

There’s still hope. The Smothers Brothers won the Emmy for Comedy Writing after their show was canceled. Las Culturistas continues to push boundaries,  has an awards show that’s airing on Bravo soon, and a skyrocketing monthly listener base. Kareem Rahma’s Subway Takes always platforms provocative guests (and me—still getting hate online for saying I don’t like movie theater reserved seats. Sorry! I don’t!). These DIY-style shows, which live outside traditional TV, are doing the heavy lifting—holding a mirror up to our world and asking, “Isn’t this fucked up?” Maybe the reason comedy is suffering is because we’ve relied too heavily on the Great Networks to give us a platform. And now the Great Networks have no choice but to listen to the whims of a man who, despite being one, can’t take a joke.

All comedy is a disruption. It’s about surprise. That’s where the laugh lives. In the jolt.It can be as light as,“Wow, I never thought of airline food that way,” or as cutting as,“Wow, I never thought THAT way about airline food.” Comics like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin didn’t endure just because they told good jokes. They reassembled the world in ways that made us question it.. Richard Pryor’s set on police brutality still resonates. The Smothers Brothers “Draft Dodger Rag” would probably offend today’s Complainer-in-Chief just as much as it did in 1967. Stephen Colbert’s ability to disrupt has been shut down —for now—and that’s dangerous for comedy at large. 

But the people who are most threatened aren’t just the big names. They’re people like my dad, whose comedy is mostly heard on a local level. Late-night shows signals what’s “in” in comedy. When they become risk-averse, that caution trickles down to the clubs, where the real disruptions are born. If comics aren’t allowed to challenge one another, we become complacent. And when we become complacent, what’s left to laugh at? 

A few weeks ago, I took my parents to see Late Night with Seth Meyers. I’m further along in my career now, so we didn’t have to enter the lottery like last time. My dad didn’t recognize the warm-up act but “knew the last guy.” My mom still practiced her laugh before the cameras rolled. I nervously checked my email to see if I was getting that interview for a writing job on a comedy series (I’m still waiting, if the EP is reading this). Then Seth Meyers came out, sat at his desk, looked directly at the camera, and knocked every joke out of the park. His monologue was sharp and honest. It was about the state of our world. And it let me—and my parents, and the audience, and maybe the nation—laugh. For one fleeting moment, we weren’t so alone.