{"id":85850,"date":"2026-05-23T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=85850"},"modified":"2026-05-22T15:14:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T21:14:24","slug":"stephen-colberts-last-show-laughing-well-is-the-best-revenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/stephen-colberts-last-show-laughing-well-is-the-best-revenge\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Colbert\u2019s last show: Laughing well is the best revenge"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Stephen<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

He didn\u2019t land the pope, but he got a Beatle. He didn\u2019t have a new project to announce, but he left us with a song (in fact two). He didn\u2019t choose to end his show, but he ended it his own weird, wonderful way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stephen Colbert hosted his final \u201cLate Show\u201d on Thursday night, completing the story of the TV year\u2019s most notorious and rancorous cancellation. But his final hour-plus \u2014 an emotional and delightfully bizarre wake for a comedy institution \u2014 turned it into a cancellebration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colbert began the night not with a monologue but what felt like a pep talk. The \u201cLate Show\u201d crew, he said, always referred to the program as the \u201cjoy machine\u201d (also the name of the current house band led by Louis Cato, the Great Big Joy Machine). The daily grind means the production has to be a kind of machine, he said, \u201cbut if you choose to do it with joy, it doesn\u2019t hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Late Show\u201d suffered its fatal on-the-job injury courtesy of CBS, which announced its cancellation a year ago. The network said that the decision was purely financial. But it coincided with the sale of its parent corporation, Paramount, to the studio Skydance, a deal that required the approval of an administration whose leader did not approve of Colbert\u2019s comedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colbert\u2019s fans smelled a rat. But for the most part, the host himself has gone out with a grin. Yes, there have been shots at CBS these closing weeks \u2014 they got what they paid for. But the vitriol has mainly been outsourced to guests, like Bruce Springsteen, who called Colbert \u201cthe first guy in America who\u2019s lost his show because we\u2019ve got a president who can\u2019t take a joke.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We got a hint of the spirit in which Colbert would bow out in his acceptance speech at last year\u2019s Emmys. He said that he began \u201cThe Late Show\u201d thinking he wanted to make a comedy show about love but realized at a certain point \u2014 \u201cYou can guess what that point was\u201d \u2014 that he was making one about loss. But he closed on a note of hope, paraphrasing Prince: \u201cIf the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy and punch a higher floor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There has always been an energy to Colbert\u2019s satire that I think of as \u201chopeful despair.\u201d It\u2019s a worldview and an aesthetic. In a 2009 interview on \u201cThe Colbert Report\u201d with John Darnielle, of the band the Mountain Goats, Colbert talks about how he admires the way Darnielle sets desolate stories to upbeat music. The effect, Colbert says, is one of saying, \u201c\u2018Is that all you\u2019ve got, old man?\u2019 as you shake your fist at God.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when you suffer a loss, you pull yourself out of the rubble, you dust off your clown suit, and you put on a show. Which is what Colbert did Thursday night. Indeed, the finale started off as a fairly normal, if valedictory, \u201cLate Show,\u201d with a topical monologue interrupted by celebrity guests including Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd and Ryan Reynolds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, the episode gradually revealed a story arc, more like the closing episode of a surreal comedy than of a talk show. The running joke was that the final guest would be Pope Leo XIV, whom the devoted Catholic host has in fact called his \u201cwhite whale.\u201d After a scripted snafu \u2014 in which the Chicago-born pope was miffed at being given a hot dog not properly dragged through the garden \u2014 Colbert introduced his actual last guest, Paul McCartney.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Final talk-show guests can sometimes appear like trophies \u2014 the bigger the get, the bigger the legacy. But the choice of McCartney, still boyishly charming with his voice etched by age, was itself a callback to TV history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Late Show\u201d broadcasts from the Ed Sullivan Theater, where the Beatles stormed American living rooms in 1964. It was a monumental moment not just for music but for television; \u201cThe Ed Sullivan Show\u201d was a mass-media platform that could tell America at once that the culture had changed. Now, one more of our few remaining mass-TV institutions \u2014 a late-night show founded by David Letterman in 1993 \u2014 was disappearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the episode rendered that disappearance literal in a climax that managed to be at once absurdist, hilarious and sweetly philosophical. The episode was repeatedly interrupted by flashes of green light, emanating from a massive space-time wormhole that, as explained by the guest Neil deGrasse Tyson, was caused by the logical contradiction of CBS canceling the most popular show in late night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joined by his old Comedy Central chum Jon Stewart and a quartet of his late-night peers \u2014 John Oliver, Seth Meyers and the Jimmys Fallon and Kimmel \u2014 Colbert faced the green vortex. It was, of course, a metaphor for the cancellation, as well as for anything that must ultimately have an end. It was also hilarious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou get out of here, hole,\u201d Kimmel said. \u201cFor the next 12 minutes, Colbert\u2019s the only one in this theater who\u2019s going to suck!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We know Colbert as a political comic, but he\u2019s always been an experimental absurdist as well. The episode recalled the 2014 finale of his previous talk show, \u201cThe Colbert Report,\u201d which ended with him killing death and becoming immortal, then flying off with Santa Claus, a unicorn-horned Abraham Lincoln and Alex Trebek.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that point, of course, he was flying off to host \u201cThe Late Show.\u201d Here, the bit was bittersweet, yet oddly beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That green vortex was a physical manifestation of the sense of loss that Colbert described at the Emmys. And it finally vacuumed Colbert into some cool purgatorial dimension, where he joined Elvis Costello and Colbert\u2019s former bandleader Jon Batiste, along with Cato, for a singalong of Costello\u2019s \u201cJump Up.\u201d Finally, he returned to the \u201cLate Show\u201d stage, to back up McCartney on a lyrically apt Beatles song: \u201cHello, Goodbye.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s left for us after \u201cThe Late Show\u201d? What\u2019s left in a media environment in which broadcasters are increasingly hesitant to stand up to power or to invest in ambitious entertainment?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t know. But, Colbert seemed to be saying, you\u2019ve got to believe that there are friends on the other side, and a song, and maybe a new start. This was goodbye; let it also be hello.<\/p>\n\n\n\n