From Punchlines to Politics: How Late Night Lost the Plot

Turns out when your "jokes" are nothing but partisan jabs, viewers notice.

Dec 23, 2025

Once upon a time, late-night comedy existed for the sole purpose of eliciting laughter. There was no moral, no message, no obligatory agenda. Oftentimes the humor was relatable (Conan’s awkward dating stories), sometimes it was silly (Letterman’s stupid pet tricks), and occasionally it was downright dirty (“No one can resist my Schweddy balls”). When jokes did get political, the butt could be left, right, or whoever happened to get busted taking a public selfie at a memorial service that week (I’m looking at you, Obama-era SNL).

Those days are officially over.

According to new data compiled by media watchdog NewsBusters, late-night comedy has become so lopsided it’s practically a DNC recruitment ad with a laugh track. In the past year alone, 92% of political jokes targeted conservatives—despite a nonstop supply of left-wing content begging to be mocked. (I mean, we’ve got millionaires parading around on “Fight the Oligarchy” tours, campaign finance scandals, gender discourse eating itself, and an entire generation discovering communism via TikTok. You’re just plain lazy if you can’t find some humor in that cultural compost heap.)

In 2025, across the combined landscape of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and The Daily Show, there have been 197 liberal guests and exactly [*checks notes*] two conservatives.

Two.

One was Greg Gutfeld—technically a libertarian, but still right-of-Rachel-Maddow so they get bragging rights.

“I became a conservative by being around liberals, and I became a libertarian by being around conservatives,” Gutfeld said in an interview. “You realize that there’s something distinctly in common between the two groups, the left and the right; the worst part of each of them is the moralizing.”

The other was economist Oren Cass, who somehow wandered onto The Daily Show to talk tariffs like it was 2009 and facts still mattered. His answers were met with the kind of polite laughter usually reserved for misunderstandings, not punchlines—less “debate,” more “zoo encounter.” (Also, in MAGA circles, Cass is widely considered a RINO. So there’s that.)

The result: jokes that feel less like comedy and more like emotional support programming. As NewsBusters put it, Colbert had effectively become “therapy for the left.” And now the couch is being repossessed: CBS recently announced it’s permanently pulling the plug on The Late Show next May, citing “purely financial reasons” which isn’t even a thinly-veiled way of saying “abysmal ratings and plummeting viewership.”

In announcing the cancellation to his audience, Colbert promised that “for the next 10 months, the gloves are off.” He continued, “I can finally speak unvarnished truth to power and say what I really think about Donald Trump starting right now.”

NARRATOR: So… he was holding back before? Blink twice if that sentence hurt you.

True to his word, Colbert went on to host Senator Elizabeth Warren for a three-part interview that doubled as a combination Trump dump and campaign ad for socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. This is simply how the genre functions now. Ninety-five percent of late-night jokes about the New York mayoral race targeted Mamdani’s rivals. Three jokes—total—were aimed at Mamdani himself. (It’s unclear from the data if those were three separate jokes or the single not-even-funny one Jimmy Fallon unflinchingly told three separate times on air.)

That’s not a slight disparity. That’s a monoculture. It’s comedy written inside a hermetically sealed echo chamber with the windows painted shut.

And it’s not subtle. Jimmy Kimmel alone reportedly lobbed 3,046 jokes at conservatives last year—97% of his political material. Trump was targeted more than 7,000 times across late night in 2025. Liberals would call it satire; I’d call it a fixation.

Of course, Hollywood has leaned left for decades. So when your writers, producers, hosts, executives, and audiences all draw from the same ideological well, what exactly do you expect to come out of the tap?

The year’s most revealing moment wasn’t a punchline—it was Kimmel’s reaction to the public execution of Charlie Kirk. Instead of, say, pausing for sobriety, Kimmel accused “the MAGA gang” of exploiting the killing for political gain. ABC temporarily pulled him off the air. When he returned, he ~~fake cried~~ apologized—not for politicizing a murder, exactly, but for the optics. Tone was the crime, you see. Not the take.

“During the Biden years, there was nobody that provided more comedy fodder possible than Joe Biden,” conservative commentator Scott Jennings told a bewildered and belligerent CNN panel. “He got left alone. Harris was left alone. They didn’t get 10% of what they deserve. If you’re going to have a late-night comedy show, at some point, people might expect it to be funny and not just a constant political screed against one party.”

Where’s the lie, though?

This tweet is more than a year old (you can read/watch the rest here).

Even though the entertainment industry has been reliably Democratic for decades, late night wasn’t always this aggressively one-sided. Earlier this year, former Tonight Show host Jay Leno slammed the current chokehold of partisan politics on comedy, pointing out that alienating half your audience tends to show up in the ratings (math remains undefeated).

“I’d get letters saying, ‘You and your Republican friends,’ and others saying, ‘You and your Democratic buddies,’ over the same joke,” Leno recalled. “And I’d think, that’s perfect. That’s how you get a whole audience.”

Late night used to be where everyone got roasted. Now it’s where one side goes to be reassured that they’re right, righteous, and incredibly intelligent for thinking the way they do. The jokes aren’t funny anymore. They soothe. They confirm. They confuse activism for humor. They clap themselves on the back. They’re predictable, which is the exact opposite of comedy.

Which certainly explains why the numbers look the way they do—and why audiences are drifting away bigly. Viewership for the likes of Fallon, Kimmel, and Colbert are down as much as 80% over the last decade for their once core demographic (ages 18-49). Turns out being lectured by millionaires in makeup isn’t a successful growth strategy.

One astute commenter on Quora brought an interesting take:

“Back in the days when Europeans were ruled over by kings, courts had ‘jesters’ (fools). They, and they alone, were given a certain latitude to poke fun at the king. If you were a minister, or a priest, of the head of a local guild, and you thought Richard III was an evil, acquisitive, jealous man, you did not dare make it too obvious. So, who got to tell the king and court that maybe he was being just a bit too… heavy handed?
The very idea that rich and well-connected people—the sort who shelled out tens of thousands of dollars to attend the fund-raiser at which Hillary Clinton made her infamous ‘basket of deplorables’ comments—think that they are the underdogs is where I think the model today has fallen down.”

When comedy stops punching up and starts punching sideways, it literally loses its punch. And court jesters who think they’re the moral majority eventually stop being funny and start being irrelevant.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be over here shaking my fist in the air, yelling at kids to get off my lawn, and waxing nostalgic about the Carson/Leno/Letterman days.

As always, LMK how you voted in the comments!

Jenna’s Side

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