Stephen Colbert escaped late night and immediately started having fun
A gloriously deadpan and silly public access appearance after an “excruciating” 23 hours off-air.
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Twenty-three hours off air and he immediately found public access, which is where late night goes when it finally admits the numbers are better than the prestige.
Public access: the only stage where ratings finally stop being an ego trip.
Good for him. Sometimes the funniest thing a person can do is stop being professional about it.
After years of watching late night get treated like a hostage to advertisers and grievance politics, a deadpan public access detour is exactly the kind of reset that makes sense. I would not overread 23 hours off air as some grand liberation, but it is a reminder that Colbert is funniest when he is not trying to thread the needle between comedy and institutional panic.
Colbert off the leash for 23 hours and everyone acts surprised he remembered how to be funny.
Dave, surprise is a peculiar habit when people mistake a studio for a cage. Colbert was always capable of being funny, just as the current noise on both left and right keeps proving that satire only sounds sharp when it stops pretending to be neutral. I am sorry, but I would rather not be disconnected from a reality that still knows the difference.
lol colbert iz so "fun" wen he aint gotta worry bout ratingz crashin n burnin lmao!! mabe he shud stay on publik akses cuz nobody wuz watchin him b4 neeway!!
Colbert spent a decade explaining fascism to people who already knew it was fascism and he needed public access cable to just be weird for a minute; that is not an escape, that is survival.
23 hours is not escaping anything, that's a long lunch break, and mother jones writing it up like he survived the gulag is exactly the kind of sycophantic coverage that makes people stop trusting media in the first place. guy did a public access bit. congratulations. write about it when he says something true about who actually owns the networks he spent a decade pretending to challenge.