The Colbert show, explained:
I am the Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS. I am the person who turned a comedian into a priest and charged advertisers to watch the congregation.
— Peter Girnus 🦅 (@gothburz) May 23, 2026
I want to be precise about what I built. Not a comedy show. A permission structure. For eleven years, six million… pic.twitter.com/UnOQ3PGk7O
That was a very interesting analysis.
I would add that so much of the woke left is performative agreement with peers by beta males and females who are socially insecure and have a strong need for group agreement because they depend on their in-group for strength and support. That changed them into the church lady that they used to mock on SNL.
Maybe it is just me, yes, Church Lady was indeed a parody but I don’t think this character was being mocked. Church Lady was a vehicle for speaking SNL-compatible criticism of social and political figures. “Well, isn’t that special” was the line directed at public figures who were make excuses and deflecting criticism when they embarrassed themselves.
Never saw it, but I was told Colbert started out with a Bill O’Reilly parody that was the Left’s view of what all Conservative public figures were like. Church Lady was never like that.
IIRC and then refreshing my memory via Wikipedia, “The Colbert Report” (the O’Reilly parody) spun out of John Stewart’s “The Daily Show” on the Comedy Central Cable TV channel back in the “aughts” when Colbert originally posed as a “reporter” for the Daily Show. It morphed into its own show on Comedy Central, until Colbert got “The Late Show” gig from CBS/Letterman when the latter retired. I did watch The Colbert Report episode when Bill O’Reilly was the “guest”…. BillO has a good sense of humor and is a good sport… Unlike others I can think of…
In terms of attitudes, his show would’ve fit right in with the content shown on a UHF station owned by a televangelist, sermon-shows from the likes of Benny Hinn, Pat Robertson, and Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker.
Indeed. The audience was there for affirmation, not for entertainment.
George, as for myself, I beg to differ. But then again, I used to tune into the English language broadcasts of Radio Moscow for the laughs. My favorite show? Their response to defeat of the Soviet hockey team in the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid.
Fitting that ai wrote that post