Late-night comedy shows are approaching extinction, yet the hosts refuse to acknowledge what viewers have understood for years: Insulting half the country is a poor business strategy. Sadly, politics has taken this former staple of late-night television and turned it into something ugly that no one wants to watch. There was a time when no one was off-limits, and the humor was all in good nature. Once the jokes gave way to hatred, people stopped tuning in. Americans didn’t abandon late-night because they lost their sense of humor; they walked away because no one enjoys being sneered at before going to bed.
In light of the trouble that the genre has been experiencing, you would think they’d figured out that what they’re doing isn’t working. Wrong. Instead, they doubled down. In 2025, 92% of jokes hammered conservatives, a 10% jump from 2024, according to a NewsBusters analysis of 818 episodes spanning Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and The Daily Show.
The imbalance extends beyond punchlines. Liberal guests dominated these programs, appearing 197 times, compared with only two conservative voices across all five shows. It’s so bad that when Greg Gutfeld made the cut to be a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in August, it was a big deal.
It should be no surprise that Jimmy Kimmel led the charge against the right, landing 3,046 conservative-targeted jokes in 2025, accounting for 97% of his political humor. He obsessed over Trump specifically, cracking 1,668 jokes about the president across 155 episodes, averaging 11 per show. Collectively, late-night hosts mentioned Trump 7,045 times in 2025, surging from 5,980 mentions in 2024.
Stephen Colbert's show, which CBS is canceling next year, operated as what NewsBusters termed a "therapy" session for the left, hosting 176 liberals against one conservative guest.
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The hosts' political advocacy spilled into active campaign work during New York's mayoral race, with 95% of election jokes targeting Zohran Mamdani's opponents. Only three of 63 jokes landed on Mamdani himself. Colbert gave Sen. Elizabeth Warren a three-segment platform to promote Mamdani nationally. "His message of affordability, his message of the rights and dignity of working people, I think, is a very powerful one that, you know, it may open in New York, but like a Broadway show, it's going to play very well in the national tour," Colbert told Warren. "Well, this is the whole point," Warren agreed, completing the campaign commercial disguised as comedy.
"The numbers don't lie," Media Research Center president David Bozell explained. "So-called late-night comedians are part of the entire elitist media complex that has fueled hatred of conservatives for years." The data support his assessment. These programs abandoned any pretense of balance, transforming into partisan echo chambers that alienate half the country. No thanks. I’ll pass.
Late-night hosts built their studios into ideological echo chambers and refuse to acknowledge this is where they went wrong. It’s a shame that they’ve killed late night, but they can’t say they weren’t warned.
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