Stephen Colbert and the Birth of Cancel Culture

Last July, talk-show host and comic Stephen Colbert used his opening monologue on The Late Show to address the news that CBS was taking him off the air. The veteran showman drank in the adoration of perhaps the lustiest crowd to pack the Ed Sullivan Theatre since the Beatles held the stage in 1964. “Folks, I’m going to go ahead and say it,” he deadpanned. “Cancel culture’s gone too far.” The gag drew the same mix of laughter and applause that always greeted Colbert’s punchlines over a decade headlining television’s biggest late-night franchise. But its implication overshadowed The Late Show’s final days: This was not a natural death.

Indeed, although network sources insist their hand was forced by mounting costs and shrinking viewership share, most media watchers blamed Donald Trump. Colbert also insinuated that the television-obsessed president, who had been the butt of thousands of Late Show jokes over the years, had engineered his downfall as the tax for permitting a US$8 billion merger between Skydance Media and Paramount Global, CBS’s corporate parent. Although Trump denied any involvement in the decision, his gloating on Truth Social did little to discourage suspicions.

But even amid the laments attending the program’s final broadcast, few echoed its host in invoking that feverish social phenomenon known colloquially—if often facetiously—as cancel culture. This omission is especially odd since, twelve years ago, it was Colbert himself who helped introduce the concept to the wider world.