Colbert Was Cancelled Because Fascists Hate Comedy

Thursday we learned CBS is cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in May 2026. This came just days after the comedian criticized CBS’s parent company Paramount Global for settling a frivolous lawsuit brought by the Donald Trump administration for $16 million over a 60 Minutes story as a “big fat bribe.”

While Paramount insists the decision to obliterate a television institution was purely “financial” — despite the show leading its time slot — everyone knows what this is. It’s silencing one of Trump’s most prominent, and funny, critics to avoid angering the dear leader.

Let’s not sugar-coat it. This is yet another page from the fascist playbook.

Comedians — specifically satirists, like Colbert — become targets for oppressive regimes just like journalists and academics, because, at its best, satire deals with hard truths. And truth is the enemy of illegitimate power.

Thankfully, the current U.S. administration is not as far down the path as, say, Russia, with Vladimir Putin’s growing list of arrested or harassed comedians. And for those outside his country, like Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he just invades your nation. But Colbert’s cancellation is clearly intended to create a chilling effect. If they can take down Stephen Colbert, they can take down anyone.

All the Trump administration has to do is threaten one of the big five media conglomerates with a lawsuit that will go in front of a Trump-appointed judge, and bam, there’s another brib... I mean legal settlement.

Colbert even joked in his monologue that continuing to criticize Trump would upset Paramount due to a coming merger with Skydance Media, which would put the billionaire nepo-baby son of Larry Ellison in charge of the company. Apparently big business is happy to aid the MAGA Maoists in their glorious cultural revolution if it means they can continue to make money. What’s more American than ignoring your own principles for cold hard cash?

It’s not like the United States doesn’t have a history of persecuted comedians. Lenny Bruce comes to mind. A man who fought for free speech and arguably lost. At its core, MAGA is all about toxic nostalgia, conflating “free speech” with the social acceptability for white comedians to say the N-word again.

But if this is all feeling a little too much like the 1930s for you, you might take comfort knowing the Nazis did have a sense of humour, contrary to popular belief. According to an excerpt from Rudolph Herzog’s Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany, Josef Goebbels used to commission informative comedy sketches to play between newsreels featuring Helle (the straight man) and Tran (the “funny” one):

HELLE: What? You want to listen to foreign radio?
TRAN: Sure, foreign news. From London, for example.
HELLE: London?
TRAN: Yeah. Do you know how to get London?
HELLE: I don’t know how to get London, but I know what you’ll get if you succeed.
TRAN: And what’s that?
HELLE: The clink, even prison!
TRAN: And if no one finds out?
HELLE: It doesn’t matter if someone finds out or not. A good German doesn’t do things like that.
TRAN: But you have to be aware of what’s around you.
HELLE: Of course, the foreign broadcasts tell the truth pure and unadulterated. Haven’t you ever heard about the news system used by our enemies? If you did, you’d know that everything they say is intended to weaken our capacity for resistance.

Laugh riot! If you missed it, the punchline was “If you listen to actual journalism, you’ll get disappeared!” Hilarious!

Fascist satire is a contradiction in terms. They have one joke: “I identify as x and my pronouns are y and z.” It’s a pathetic attempt at humour, but it’s literally all they have. That’s because fascism traffics in resentment and aggrieved entitlement, the least joyful parts of the soul. They tell you a story about fighting the enemies of the people when they’re really just victimizing the already marginalized. They’re bullies. Bullies with easily bruised skin who are too weak to withstand any criticism.

This is ultimately an issue of freedom of expression and of the press. Colbert’s cancellation is one of several other stories from the unending firehose of horrors.

The U.S. Congress just clawed back billions in funding for public media like PBS. I mean, why not just drone strike Elmo live on air?

Meanwhile, Trump is now threatening to sue the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch for publishing an alleged birthday message to Trump’s friend and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, which concluded by saying, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

That was all just Thursday!

Fascism is what happens when we let the humourless resentful losers win. Don’t let them. If the laughter dies, we’ll have lost a lot more than that — we’ll have lost truth, freedom and everything else we’re supposed to value in a democracy.