Stephen Colbert Is Leaving. His Alter Ego Should Return.

There’s little doubt that Stephen Colbert will land on his feet after wrapping up his eleven-year run on The Late Show next May. He’s in a position to do whatever he’d like next, but if ever a time called for it, what the world needs now is “Stephen Colbert.”

You remember him: the bombastic, self-important, commentator and host of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. For nine years, Colbert inhabited the character of the Fox News-styled personality in what was the most comprehensive parody in television history, executing one of the most consistent “big laugh” shows ever on late night.

That show ended more than a decade ago, when Colbert took the leap and jumped from what was then considered sort of Triple-A late night—a show on basic cable—to the “show,” which was then the majors, the bigger arena of broadcast network television with its 100 percent reach into American households.

Nobody could question the move. Colbert would be succeeding a genuine late-night legend in David Letterman; he’d be making a bigger salary and enjoying the more bountiful resources of a network late-night show. Like, for example, a band. Not to mention an iconic home base, the Ed Sullivan Theater on a street called Broadway.

But here we are ten years later. The late-night landscape is being battered by brutally stormy weather, and the resulting erosion is leaving blighted, barren patches all over, including an incipient sinkhole where CBS’s late-night lineup used to be.

That has occurred at least partly because the winds of political comedy have shifted and Colbert’s uncompromising opposition to the Trump Administration has drawn fire from a White House unfettered by First Amendment concerns.

Colbert has certainly delivered impassioned jokes in his nightly monologues, holding Trump and his retinue up to withering ridicule. It has not been unusual for a Colbert monologue to go on for 12 minutes or more with little else but zingers about Trump.

They have been well-delivered. Colbert, who was not a stand-up comic by trade, became, in very quick fashion, a polished and accomplished monologist. His stage presence and comic timing have been strong, the laughs honest and earned.

But those who haven’t seen the original bumptious auteur of ridiculousness also called “Stephen Colbert,” have not seen the outrageously gifted, real Stephen Colbert.

On The Colbert Report, Colbert found a niche no other performer had ever even attempted in late night.  

The faux Colbert was virtually never out of character. Off camera, he would warn new guests who might not have familiarity with the fictional “Colbert” that he was going to question them like an ideologue with almost no actual knowledge of events and absolutely no regard for an opposing point of view.

Or, as he would tell them, “My character is an idiot.”

But Colbert’s consistency, and the passion he infused his character with, actually led some viewers to believe he was for real.

Famously, the legal defense fund for Tom DeLay, the former firebrand arch-conservative Republican House Majority leader, used clips from one of “Colbert’s” interviews with filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who had created a documentary critical of DeLay, to defend DeLay. They thought “Colbert” was a real conservative.

Most of all, though, The Colbert Report was conspicuously funny, and many nights hilariously funny. It was brilliantly written, a truly challenging task because it always had to assert views in a totally backwards manner.

The only reason it worked is that the real Stephen Colbert was so deep into his character that he could do the jiu jistu moves required to parody a Fox News host like Bill O’Reilly with both devastating accuracy and delirious comedy.

Colbert was so good at this act that it was initially truly difficult for him to launch a more conventional late-night talk show and be his true self. That ought to have been far easier than slipping into a costume of an utterly opposite-thinking human being every night.

Colbert, as he has conceded, didn’t do it smoothly. It took time for him to find his performing chops as the person he was born as. To his credit, he found the formula to settle into himself and perform at a high level.

But it was a different thing: joke-centric comedy as opposed to character-centric comedy. In a monologue you joke about someone from the outside; with a satirical character you joke about someone from the inside.

And since the end of The Colbert Report, the comedy skewering has mostly been done from the outside. Saturday Night Live does character comedy in sketches. The Daily Show still has correspondents acting out nonsensical versions of political rhetoric.

But the master hasn’t been doing it.

Would Colbert ever do it again? He had every right to be relieved to escape the creative leap of invading another man’s psyche and living in there four times a week. But he’s been making quasi-joking overtures to streamers about joining one of those operations, and he has briefly resurrected the character on a handful of occasions for The Late Show.

How long would it take for Colbert to sell a revival of The Colbert Report to HBO Max or Netflix? Thirty seconds?

What television lacks isn’t another sober commentator—it lacks the weaponized parody that makes true believers squirm and skeptics howl with laughter. Nobody ever did that better than “Stephen Colbert.”

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