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 those unaware, between his acts of spreading imperialist propaganda with CGI abs and the trials and tribulations of caped crusaders battling film critics, zack snyder Created Watchmen, a graphic novel retold as a film, the plot of which revolves around the untimely demise of a misogynistic psychopath named The Comedian.This is the issue plaguing Bollywood, not the misogynistic sociopaths, though they may have been there, but the missing comedians. Before, there was a clear divide in Bollywood plots: the hero would brag about his relationship with his mother, the mother would look cool and sad, the heroine would dance, the villain would drink Wet 69 while expropriating land from poor people, and the comedian would make the audience laugh. All this changed with Dharmendra’s comic turn in Chupke Chupke Aur Amitabh Bachchan Transforming an angry young man into an arrogant clown in Amar Akbar Anthony.A process that began in the 1970s finally reached its conclusion by the 1990s, when Chi-Chi arrived on screen and the distinction between hero and comedian collapsed like a wave in no time. It was tough enough for professional comedians, who lived and died by the audience’s laughter: the Johnny Walkers, Mehmoods, Keshto Mukherjees of the world, Asrani, Jagdeep Sahab and Paintals, men who once existed as isolated comic planets but increasingly found themselves orbiting heroes who had learned to make their own jokes. It was the pre-AI equivalent of the product manager making coders extinct by vibe-coding with the cloud.And now America finds itself standing on the same precipice with the same problematic statement: the missing comedian, which is strange because America is a nation that worships at the altar of the first and supports the second.But it says something when the incoming king is funnier than most late-night TV hosts, which brings us to the current situation where CBS is ready to pull the plug. stephen colbert‘s Late Show. Colbert is a comedian who has survived 20 years and 3,000 episodes across two TV networks, so understandably his acolytes are a little perplexed. The reaction was predictable, with CNN’s Roy Wood Jr. praising him for “sticking to the truth” and Hasan Minhaj praising him for “always nailing every moment”.So why is CBS holding off? Is this just to please the orange overlord?
This may be part of the reason, but it’s not the only reason, so let’s open the box to explain and examine the true nature of the Schrödinger’s Cat-like state of comedy in America, and late-night comedy in particular.First, while Colbert’s colleagues may applaud him for “sticking to the truth,” one would not want to be told that Colbert’s truth was often one-sided.Take the coverage leading up to the 2024 US election, where Colbert was an unabashed superfan of Kamala Harris, waxing lyrical about her “verbal kung fu” and even incorporating quotes from Morpheus calling her The Chosen One. Of course, that’s their prerogative, but audiences, voters and even reality don’t agree.Harris’s campaign was over on arrival. The same candidate who failed to garner a single vote at the 2020 Democratic National Convention was being given the responsibility to lead as Biden’s declining mental acuity became impossible to hide. Arriving late to the game, Harris failed to explain how her campaign differed from Biden’s and consistently stumbled in interviews to the point that they had to be edited out, leading to her own legal fights.It wasn’t just Colbert who became the de facto media arm of the Democrat Party. All of his fellow comedians are less comedians and more preachers, constantly yelling at the world for disagreeing with his worldview, which, to borrow a line from Jay Leno, “alienated half the audience”.Now comedians of all eras have begun to lean left and take digs at the high and mighty.While people like Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and David Letterman made political jokes, they were generally light and non-partisan, without deep ideological commitment, to avoid alienating the massive network audience. A study titled “Detecting Trump: The Re-Politicization of America’s Late-Night Talk Shows in a Polarized Public Sphere” published online on May 24, 2025, states that this changed with Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, which promoted George Bush’s imaginary war on terrorism, focused on attacking Bush, Fox News, neocons, and the Iraq War, becoming the Fifth Estate, and then immediately went into a shell after Obama’s arrival, with more moderate behavior. Was done.Then Trump came to collapse the equation, going from being seen as absurdist comedy gold to a threat: to minorities, to democratic norms, and everything else. Over time, comedy became conspicuous by its absence, replaced by moral sermons that were expected on the stage rather than on late-night TV.But sermons also need sponsors, and this is where the economics become cruel.
The second reason for comedy’s decline is financial: Colbert may be the major star of a late-night show, but it’s like being the number one Blockbuster store in the age of Netflix. The entire ecosystem has collapsed, with revenues falling from $439 million in 2018 to $220 million in 2024, with CBS reportedly losing $40 million a year sponsoring one comic’s ideological crusade.The third reason is the advent of other means of entertainment. From roasts to podcasts to memes, anyone with a camera turned comedic content creator, late night hosts began to look like dinosaurs trying to avoid meteorites from all sides. Who would wait till 9 pm to watch a joke on TV when hardly anyone is watching TV? The best bits can always be cut and reused into snackable little reels that will be shared across the myriad platforms that now exist. Among them wasAnd perhaps the fourth and biggest reason for the demise of comedians in America is the same as in Bollywood, where comedians had to go into the proverbial David Dhawan Reserve for Protected Species to survive: The main man became too funny. From Dharmendra to Amitabh Bachchan, Govinda and Khan trio to Akshay Kumar, comedy is no longer just the domain of comedians.
The same applied to America, where no comedian working late nights could hope to compete with Trump when it came to providing laughs, often to tears. If Reagan was the propagator of Soviet jokes, and Obama was the first alt-comedy president, Trump is every single genre of comedy wrapped in a tight drumskin.He’s the kind of guy who goes to China despite the Epstein files, and then It is lyrical how beautiful the children are. he can’t stop talking about the one dead golfer’s junkWhaley discusses his lifelong desire to become a psychiatrist and listens attentively when someone explains the effects of cocaine. He sprays cologne on former terrorists before donating a perfume for his wife and then Inquires whether he has more than one wife. He decks his halls with gold, keeps talking about it Ballroom with anyone who will listen, Mocks his own allies for capturing Ozempik, declares victory after sabotaging the world economy, kidnaps leaders of foreign countries and forces news organization to do the same run a fact check On whether he took a look at Xi Jinping’s notebook. Forget about comedians, even reality can’t compete with that.
