What do the graphic novel Watchmen, Bollywood and America have in common? They all have to deal with the mystery of the missing ‘comedian’. For the uninitiated, between his acts of making imperialist propaganda with CGI abs and the trials and travails of caped crusaders battling film critics, Zack Snyder made Watchmen, a graphic novel retelling masquerading as a movie, whose plot revolves around the untimely demise of a misogynist psychopath called the Comedian.The same issue plagued Bollywood, not the misogynist psychopaths, though they might have been there, but missing comedians. Earlier, Bollywood plots had clear compartmentalisation: the hero bragged about his relationship with his mother, the mother looked stoic and sad, the heroine danced, the villain drank Vat 69 while usurping poor people’s land, and the comedian made the audience laugh. All that changed with Dharmendra’s comic turn in Chupke Chupke and Amitabh Bachchan swapping the angry young man for a swaggering jester in Amar Akbar Anthony.A process that started in the 1970s eventually reached its conclusion by the 1990s, when Chi-Chi arrived onscreen and the demarcation between hero and comedian had collapsed like a wave function the moment it was observed. This was rather hard on professional comedians who lived and died by the audience’s laughter: the Johny Walkers, Mehmoods, Keshto Mukherjees, Asranis, Jagdeep Sahabs and Paintals of the world, men who once existed as separate comic planets but increasingly found themselves orbiting heroes who had learned to do their own jokes. It was the pre-AI equivalent of a product manager making coders extinct by vibe-coding with Claude.And now America finds itself on the same precipice with the same problem statement: the missing comedian, which is odd given America is the nation that worships at the altar of the First and has the Second to back it up.But it says something when the visiting king is funnier than most late-night TV hosts, which brings us to the current predicament where CBS is set to pull the plug on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. Colbert is a comedian who has survived for 3,000 episodes across 20 years and two TV networks, so obviously his acolytes are a little upset. The reaction is predictable, with CNN’s Roy Wood Jr hailing him for “sticking to the truth” and Hasan Minhaj praising him for “always meeting the moment”.So why is CBS pulling the plug? Is it just to appease the orange overlord?
That may be part of the reason, but it’s not the only one, so let’s open the box to explain and examine the real nature of Schrödinger’s cat-like state of comedy in America, and late-night comedy in particular.First off, while Colbert’s allies might hail him for “sticking to the truth”, one would be wont to point out that Colbert’s truth was often one-sided.Take the coverage during the run-up to the 2024 US election, where Colbert was an unabashed superfan of Kamala Harris, waxing lyrical about her “verbal kung fu” and even overlaying her quotes with Morpheus calling her The Chosen One. That is, of course, his prerogative, but the audience, the voters and even reality begged to differ.Harris’ campaign was dead on arrival. The same candidate who failed to muster a single vote in the 2020 Democratic National Convention was being given the mantle to lead once Biden’s diminishing mental acuity became impossible to hide. Arriving late in the game, Harris failed to explain how her campaign was different from Biden’s and constantly stumbled in interviews to the point that they had to be edited, which led to its own legal wrangles.It wasn’t just Colbert who became a de-facto media arm of the Democrat party. All of his peers are less comics and more sermonisers, constantly shouting at the world for disagreeing with their worldview, which, to borrow a line from Jay Leno, “alienated half the audience”.Now comedians of all eras have tended to lean left and take potshots at the high and mighty.While the likes of Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and David Letterman did political jokes, they were usually light and non-partisan, without deep ideological commitment, to avoid alienating mass network audiences. As a study titled “Figuring out Trump: the re-politicization of US late night talk shows in a polarized public sphere”, published online on May 24, 2025, noted, that changed with Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, which pilloried George Bush’s imaginary War on Terror, focusing on attacking Bush, Fox News, neocons and the Iraq War, becoming the Fifth Estate, and then instantly going into a shell once Obama arrived, who was treated more gently.Then Trump arrived to crash the equation, going from being treated as absurd comedy gold to a threat: to minorities, democratic norms and everything else. With time, the comedy became conspicuous by its absence, replaced by moral sermons that would have been expected at the pulpit instead of late-night TV.But even sermons need sponsors, and this is where the economics becomes brutal.
The second reason for comedy’s stumble is financial: Colbert might be the leading star of late-night shows, but that’s like being the number one Blockbuster store in the era of Netflix. The whole ecosystem has collapsed, with revenue falling from $439 million in 2018 to $220 million in 2024, with CBS reportedly losing $40 million a year to sponsor a comic’s ideological crusades.The third reason is the arrival of other forms of entertainment. From roasts to podcasts to memes, with anyone with a camera becoming a comedic content creator, late-night hosts started resembling dinosaurs trying to survive meteorites from all sides. Who is going to wait till 9pm to watch a joke on TV when barely anyone is watching TV? The best bits could always be cut and repurposed into snackable small reels that would be shared on the myriad platforms that exist now. Among them was X, which, for all its faults under Elon Musk’s regime, became a lot freer of Big Tech’s control.And perhaps the fourth and biggest reason for the comedian’s demise in America is the same as in Bollywood, where comedians had to move to the proverbial David Dhawan Reserve for Protected Species to survive: the main man became too funny. From Dharmendra to Amitabh Bachchan to Govinda to the Khan troika to Akshay Kumar, comedy was no longer the exclusive preserve of the comedian.
The same went for America, where no late-night comedian can hope to compete with Trump when it comes to getting laughs, often interspersed with tears. If Reagan was a purveyor of Soviet jokes, and Obama the first alt-comedy president, Trump is every single genre of comedy wrapped in one tight drumskin.He’s the sort of person who goes to China, despite the Epstein files, and then waxes lyrical about how beautiful the children are. He can’t stop talking about a dead golfer’s junk, discusses his lifelong desire to be a whale psychiatrist and listens attentively when someone explains the effects of cocaine. He sprays former terrorists with cologne before giving one perfume for his wife and then inquires if he has more than one wife. He decks up his halls in gold, keeps talking about his ballroom with anyone who will listen, mocks his own allies for taking Ozempic, declares victory after breaking the globe’s economy, kidnaps leaders of foreign countries and forces news organisation to run fact checks on whether he peeked at Xi Jinping’s notebook. Forget comedians, even reality cannot compete with that.
