‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ Could Never Match the Greatness of ‘The Colbert Report’

Stephen Colbert deserves all those Emmy Awards for his work on The Late Show, but when it comes to wickedly sharp satire, the CBS host can’t hold a candle to “Stephen Colbert.”

That “Stephen Colbert” was the fictional, right-wing political commentator who got his start on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show before launching his own Comedy Central vehicle, The Colbert Report. He brought home an armful of Emmy, Grammy and Peabody Awards for his savage parody of Fox News roundtable talkers.

Posing as “Colbert” gave Colbert latitude to influence culture in the way a regular comedian never could. His show introduced new vocabulary into the American lexicon, including truthiness, that quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. Truthiness was so sticky that it was named the American Dialect Society Word of the Year for 2005. The Colbert Report also taught us about freem (freedom without the responsibility of having to “do” anything) and wikiality (reality as decided by majority rule). 

Like some drive-by readers of The Onion, part of the delight in The Colbert Report was people who didn’t understand it was a joke. A study published in the International Journal of Press/Politics revealed that strong conservatives didn’t get it, believing Colbert was a Republican who hated liberals as much as they did.

And like its parent, The Daily Show, many viewers in the 2000s relied on The Colbert Report as a main source of news information. Young males, in particular, were more likely not only to get their news from Colbert but also to name him as a trusted source, according to a Pew Research Center report. 

Influence aside, the show was also hilarious. “Better Know A District” was a recurring segment in which Colbert gave government representatives a length of rope, allowing them to tie themselves into knots. The bipartisan skewering was so effective that Democratic Caucus chairman Rahm Emanuel counseled his fellow Democrats not to appear on the show. Colbert, of course, roasted Emanuel over the advice.

But Colbert, as “Colbert,” had no finer moment than the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, possibly the bravest performance in the event’s history. He pretended George Bush was his hero, a man with whom he had much in common. “We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol,” he told the sitting President. “We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right, sir?”

He continued to let Bush have it, right to his face. “I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls,” Colbert bragged. “We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ‘reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Several Bush aides and supporters got up and left during Colbert’s speech, according to U.S. News and World Report. Bush himself stuck it out, though he was furious. According to one aide, “He’s got that look that he’s ready to blow.”

The Colbert Report was a one-joke, high-wire act that somehow managed to be hilarious for nearly a decade. Critics at Entertainment Weekly marveled at what the comedian was able to pull off. “Colbert proves that the line between serious TV journalism and utter nonsense is a very thin one indeed.”