Stephen Colbert Explains Why ‘The Late Show’ Became More Political: ‘That’s the Part the Audience Wants to See’

Stephen Colbert said he leaned into current events on The Late Show after initially planning to be less political after leaving The Colbert Report. Speaking to The New York Times this week, Colbert explained that when he took over for David Letterman in 2015 CBS discouraged him from “being topical.”

“It was my instinct to be less topical, because I didn’t want to have to engage with what I saw was an increasingly contentious public discourse,” Colbert said. “And I thought, aren’t there other ways to have fun with the audience?”

After a few months, though, he began introducing more political jokes. “I was like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, or is it some other movie? He buried his guns,” Colbert recalled. “And I’m like, you know, I buried those damn guns. I was talking to Paul Dinello — he’s one of my oldest friends and one of my producers here — and he’s like, ‘You’re having fun, and people love to see that.’ And I said, ‘But that means I got to go dig up the guns.’ And he says, ‘Buddy, that’s the part the audience wants to see.'”

Being political has, of course, drawn the ire of the Trump administration. Colbert said that he believes that’s because “authoritarians don’t like anybody who doesn’t give them undue dignity.”

“Comedians are anti-authoritarian by nature,” the host noted. “And authoritarians are never going to like anybody to laugh at them. The number of newspeople who have said to me or Jon Stewart or any of the guys who do this, ‘God, I wish I could say what you say on air.’ And we can. I think that upsets them. I think it might be upsetting that we really do not live in their world of principalities and powers.”

He added, “I don’t have any problem with Trump being a Republican. I have a problem with Trump being a complete narcissist who is only working for his own interest and does not appear to care if the entire world burns. That’s not a partisan position.”

Last year, CBS announced it was cancelling The Late Show, citing the decision as a “financial” one. The final episode will air on May 21. It’s been speculated that CBS’s parent company Paramount pulled the plug to curry favor with Donald Trump and the FCC to ensure a merger between Paramount and Skydance would go through.

“I do not dispute their rationale,” Colbert said about CBS. “I do make jokes about it. But I also completely understand why people would say (a) that doesn’t make sense to me and (b) that seems fishy to me, because the network did it to themselves by bending the knee to the Trump administration over a $20 billion, settled for $16 million, completely frivolous lawsuit.”

He added, “It’s possible that two things can be true. Broadcast can be in trouble. They cannot monetize because of things like YouTube, because of the competition of streaming. They’ve got the books, and I do not have any desire to debate them over what they say their business model is and how it does not work for them anymore. But less than two years before they called to say it’s over, they were very eager for me to be signed for a long time. So, something changed.”