Late-night talk shows weren’t always the tip of the spear.
For most of its history, this distinctly American genre introduced audiences to polite Midwestern men in suits who lulled viewers to sleep with apolitical punchlines and celebrity chat. The comedians generating controversy by addressing hot-button issues were stand-ups like Lenny Bruce or George Carlin or Dave Chappelle. But the joke tellers who have emerged as the highest-profile critics of the second Trump administration — and the ones most under attack — are that supposedly endangered species: the network late-night hosts. How did these establishment figures become so political?
Conservatives have argued that late-night network hosts became cocooned in their own liberal bubble, their shift to more overt critiques of Trump motivated by politics, not commercial interests.Others point to President Trump, who has the Midas touch for politicizing everything he touches. Neither explanation is entirely right.
To understand how network late-night hosts became such critics of Trump, you have to take the long view, because their increasingly political commentary preceded the current president and happened gradually. You can trace the evolution quite neatly over the career of Jimmy Kimmel, who has moved from the frat-boy humor of “The Man Show” in the early 2000s to the unlikely face of the resistance, earnestly championing free speech and journalistic independence in his return to television Tuesday night after Disney had suspended his ABC show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” under pressure from the Trump administration.
The most important influence on Kimmel has always been his childhood hero, David Letterman (“my Jesus,” he once called the older star) and some of his actions now reflect the knee-jerk irreverence toward authority that “Late Night With David Letterman” regularly displayed in the 1980s.
But searching for Jimmy Kimmel’s road to Damascus moment will only get you so far. The political shift of late-night television — and Kimmel — began with the influential program that followed “The Man Show” on Comedy Central: “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” Of course, there had been popular political comedy on late night before Stewart — from contentious episodes of “The Dick Cavett Show” in the 1960s and ’70s to Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” in the ’90s (which aired on ABC and was replaced by, wait for it, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”). But Stewart’s success gave birth to an entirely new genre of righteous comedy. He didn’t just comment on the news. For many, he provided a substitute news source.
Stewart relentlessly mocked the Bush administration during the run-up to the war in Iraq, but he was equally biting and persistent ridiculing the superficiality of media coverage. There’s a direct line from Stewart’s success in bonding with his viewers by contemptuously mocking the political media to what Joe Rogan does on his podcast before entertaining alternate theories on vaccines or World War II.
Stewart cultivated a staff of correspondents (John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, among others) that became a major source of future talk-show hosts. Stewart consistently beat Conan O’Brien at the Emmy Awards, which in retrospect did display a certain bias toward the mistaken idea that political comedy is the more ambitious kind.
But the main reason that Stewart changed late night is simply that his show drew audiences, especially young ones. You started to see hosts like Letterman become more outspoken in their politics, not just battling with a vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, but also regularly inviting an unfiltered businessman named Donald Trump to spout off about the news of the day.
When Letterman retired, CBS replaced him with Colbert, who got off to a rocky start but found his footing after the 2016 election once he began delivering more passionate commentary on the news. He eventually did what Letterman could not, surpass “The Tonight Show” in the ratings year after year. Being the ratings leader did not, however, keep Colbert’s show from losing money or getting canceled.
Putting aside the political considerations, the economic model for talk shows collapsed for the same reason that print media’s did: The internet. Ad rates plummeted. Social media made topical jokes before late-night shows did. And the growing fragmentation of the culture changed the calculus of what would resonate. Johnny Carson appealed to a vast national audience in part because viewers had little else to watch. Now everyone has broken up into cultural silos and they don’t share the same reference points. One of the few subjects that people of wildly diverse ages and backgrounds have a reliably common interest in is, as it happens, presidential politics.
This is the world Jimmy Kimmel competes in. The best joke he made the last time he hosted the Oscars was an improvised response to an insult Trump posted on social media. One of Kimmel’s most gripping talk-show monologues was a personal argument about health care that he delivered after his son underwent emergency open-heart surgery. These moments resonate because they are genuine; while political combat has always drawn eyeballs, these moments also emerge in a specific context.
The era of topical comedy aiming for a broad monoculture is gone. If you dislike liberals or the mainstream media, there’s no shortage of performers who mix conservative commentary with mockery, from Greg Gutfeld on Fox News to the conservative podcaster Steven Crowder to countless accounts on X. What’s striking about the stand-up comedy scene this year is how few specials on major streaming platforms have even tried to take on the current administration and capture the political zeitgeist
Whether that’s because Trump has become a boring subject, not enough time has passed, or artists and executives are exercising caution is unclear. The latest major producer of specials happens to be Hulu, which is owned by the same company that suspended Kimmel. This does not bode well for the future of political comedy in the platform’s stand-up specials.
This all adds up to a market that is open for liberal comic critiques of power right now. And late-night talk show hosts have filled that niche. Critics who have been incessantly saying that late night no longer matters are going to need to catch up. The government doesn’t go after entertainers because they are irrelevant. Right now, whatever you think of Kimmel’s politics or humor, there’s no denying that his monologue on Tuesday night was the must-see comedy event of the year.
He began with a tribute to the history of free-spirited defiance in the late night genre that surely went over the heads of most of his audience, quoting the first line spoken by the “Tonight Show” host Jack Paar in 1960 when he returned to air after walking out abruptly in the middle of a show: “As I was saying before I was interrupted.” Paar’s early exit protested network censorship of less obvious national significance: A reference to the toilet.
Let’s remember that Trump has appeared on network talks shows for decades. He loved being a guest. So perhaps it makes a kind paradoxical sense that only he could even have a chance at doing the impossible: Make late-night great again.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
The post How Did Late-Night Get So Political? It Didn’t Start With Trump appeared first on New York Times.
