gracchusdixit

To listen to the hubbub surrounding CBS’ decision to replace the retiring host of its late night show, David Letterman, with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, you might be forgiven for  imagining that some earthshaking event has occurred, that a watershed moment in the cultural and political life of the whole nation has been reached and crossed.

The pundits and celebrity gawkers announced the change in awestruck, slack-jawed, wide-eyed wonder.  They have lavished Letterman with praise: as an innovator, a comedic pioneer, a daring astronaut of the entertainment universe whose years of cracking jokes in the wee hours constituted a giant step forward in the all-important business of amusing mankind.

As to Colbert, the fawning and gushing have been boundless.  “I never imagined he would go so far,” said one.  “The question everyone is asking,” said another, in a sycophantic, reverential hush, “is what he will do with this new big platform.”  To hear such people talk, we might be witnessing nothing less momentous than the election of a new President or Pope.

Colbert himself has done nothing to dampen the hyperbole, saying, among many other things: “Simply being a guest on David Letterman’s show has been a highlight of my career.  I never dreamed that I would follow in his footsteps, though everyone in late night follows Dave’s lead.”  With Colbert, of course, it’s never easy to tell whether he’s being serious, or sarcastic, or merely self-serving.  He is quite clever enough to be all three at once.

At the other, distinctly less clever end of the babbling spectrum, however, the conservative media reacted to the news with instantaneous and unbridled rage.  Colbert made his bones at Comedy Central by cracking his jokes “in character”—a character loosely modeled on Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly.  Colbert’s particular inspiration was to have mocked O’Reilly merely by impersonating him, and he played the character so well that the funniest joke on his show was invariably the character himself.  To people on the right, CBS’ decision to hire Colbert was thus another illustration of the “mainstream media’s” treasonous liberalism.  The ultimate right-wing gas-bag, Rush Limbaugh, went so far as to say: “CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America.”  He proceeded to add, with a characteristic lack of delicacy or grace, that he was “pissed off”—a fact that, if true, has its own comedic value.

What is missing, and has been missed, in all this hot air is the bracing, cold air of reality.  The reality is that the world of late night television talk shows hasn’t been a “big platform” in many years.  Perhaps it was when Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon ruled the roost on the Tonight Show, or when Saturday Night Live—a distinctly “political” show if ever there was one—first burst upon the scene.  But that was a very long time ago.  Jimmy Fallon, proclaimed the “new king of late night” by the unstoppable publicity machine of the television business is, in truth, the monarch of a small duchy located somewhere high up in the Bavarian Alps.

Today, the late night shows on the so-called “big three” television networks are watched by scarcely more than ten percent of the audience still capable of propping its eyelids open at midnight.  The remaining ninety percent are watching something else, though it is hard to imagine how they have the energy to watch anything at all.  Indeed, the audience that watches Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central is only fractionally smaller than the audience that will be watching David Letterman when he says goodnight for the last time.  That is why the last host of the Tonight Show, Jay Leno, chose to retire when he did.  Being no fool, he saw the graffiti scrawled on the wall.  Better to leave when there was still somebody around to notice your departure.

Rush Limbaugh should therefore rest easy.  If CBS has in truth “declared war on the heartland of America,” it is about to have a tough fight on its hands.  It isn’t easy to win a war without bullets.