Howâs this for a political scouting report? White man in his early 60s from deep-red South Carolina. Progressive views on civil rights and a deeply held Catholic faith. Happily married to one woman for more than 30 years. Three kids. Used to teach Sunday school. Has a loyal dog that sits at his feet when heâs working in his office. Can carry a tune. Speaks from the heart about loss and grief, having lost a parent and two siblings when he was a child. Adept at cracking jokes.
Iâm not suggesting that Stephen Colbert run for president. Iâm merely pointing out that he embodies the phrase âparagon of decency.â
Decency: it used to be a virtue in the public square. The words that finally squelched Senator Joe McCarthyâs Commie-hunting reign of terror came from a lawyer for the U.S. Army, Joseph Welch, who, unable to bear another moment of the senatorâs evidence-free bullying, said, âHave you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?â Thereafter, McCarthy became a pariah, censured in the Senate by a vote of 67 to 22 and getting the silent treatment even from his fellow Republicans.
Now it is Colbert, the paragon of decency, who is getting kicked to the curb. Nominally, itâs because his parent network, CBS, decided that his show, the top-rated in late-night TV, was too expensive to sustain. Realistically, itâs because the networkâs parent company, Paramount, sacrificed Colbert to appease Donald Trump when it was seeking federal approval for its merger with Larry Ellisonâs Skydance. Spiritually, itâs because we live in a time of inverted norms, where the president can casually post something like âA whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,â yet Stephen Colbert is the one castigated for being divisive.
Of late, there have been signs that inverted-norm fatigue may finally be taking hold. No one really bought the jive of the New York Post when it tried to gin up a new wave of outrage over Jimmy Kimmel, going to elaborate rhetorical lengths to reverse-engineer a joke heâd made about Melania Trump two days before the thwarted assassination attempt at the White House Correspondentsâ Association dinnerââMrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widowââinto a veiled threat on the president.
The First Lady and the president pretended to be gravely offended, and their lackey at the F.C.C., Brendan Carr, duly ordered an early review of the broadcast licenses held by Disney, the parent company of Kimmelâs network, ABC. But unlike the F.C.C.âs last go-round with Kimmel, when their intimidation succeeded in getting the network to suspend the comedian over a crack heâd made about Charlie Kirkâs killer, Disney did not buckle. Notwithstanding his beer-bloated early years as a co-host of Comedy Centralâs âThe Man Show,â the latter-day Kimmel is also a conspicuously decent family man, too menschy to be sold as a dangerous inflammateur.
The F.C.C. has no regulatory oversight of social media, but if it did, Truth Social, owned by Carrâs boss, would be a far more deserving target of high dudgeon and taste-policing. The same December week that Kimmel fought back tears while discussing the recent death of his best friend and bandleader, Cleto Escobedo, the president attributed Rob Reinerâs tragic death to âthe anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable afflictionâ with âTrump Derangement Syndrome.â Three months later, Trump observed the passing of Robert Mueller by posting, âIâm glad heâs dead.â
Still, any potential turning of the tide comes too late for Colbert. He is losing his show, as Kimmel nearly lost his, precisely because he poses a threat to indecency. Itâs akin to how the authors of the Project 2025 playbook proposed to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (and succeeded) in part because of its involvement in âSesame Street,â which they described as âbiased to the Left.â I wrote a book about âSesame Street.â I can tell you that, ethos-wise, it hasnât changed much since it premiered in 1969 with the enthusiastic support of the Nixon administration. Whatâs changed is that the decency it represents is an affront to the indecent people now in power.
Last month I attended a taping of âThe Late Show with Stephen Colbertâ at the Ed Sullivan Theater. Since the start of this year, the episodes have had an elegiac feel, ever more so as the final broadcast approaches. The day I was there, Maggie Rogers, in a nod to Bette Midlerâs serenade of Johnny Carson in his penultimate âTonight Showâ episode, sang a lovely rendition of âOne More for My Baby (And One for the Road).â
It was a sweet moment, if of an entirely different energy than the 1992 broadcast. Midlerâs choice of a Sinatra-associated saloon song came freighted with Carsonâs own dark history: the cigarettes, the bad moods, the divorces, and the D.U.I.âs, all of which were as much a part of his persona as his wit and elegance. (Indeed, Dana Carvey, whose short-lived 1996 sketch show gave Colbert his first screen time, does an inspired bit in which he freestyles impersonations of Carson getting pulled over by a state trooper: âSorry, officer, I didnât know I was swerving. I had two Slippery Monkeys at the Hook ânâ Crook.â)
Whereas Carson was consumed by demons and David Letterman by self-loathing, Colbert is an anomalously wholesome and ministerial figure for late nightâmore Fred Rogers than Don Draper. When I interviewed him for a magazine feature four years ago, Colbert told me, with the caveat that he knew it sounded pretentious, that his program was a âshow about love.â He then quoted E. E. Cummings: âLove is the every only God / who spoke this earth so glad and big.â
Being present for his guests as a good listener, he explained, was an act of love. His house bandâs music was an expression of love. So, too, were his monologues, the very material that placed him in his own networkâs crosshairs. âWhat I found after a couple of years of doing the show,â he observed, âis that we often realize we love something as weâre losing it. Many things were lost in the last five years: standards, morals, a shared reality, a shared civic engagement, a lot of friends. So by addressing loss, thatâs how the show talks about love.â
Now we must prepare for the loss of âThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert.â Already, the format it representsâthe comforting, lavishly produced late-night talk show with a host, a band, a desk, and a couchâfaces potential extinction, what with podcasts, YouTubers, and a weaselly new class of network overlords. The difference is that Colbertâs show was put down pre-emptively, like a dog in the care of Kristi Noem. That being the harsh reality, let us share, in its final days, our love for the show about love.âDavid Kamp for Air Mail
(The final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will air on May 21.)
Photograph by Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images.
James Grissom













