Farewell to Stephen Colbert, fake laughs, and lame late-night bias



Those who still remember what real comedy looks like got some good news last week: CBS announced that it’s canceling Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

I know what you’re thinking — hadn’t that already happened? Spiritually? Emotionally? Creatively? Fair questions. After all, the last time Colbert got a genuine laugh, the Comedy Network still existed, and you could make a joke on TV without it requiring a full apology tour.

Look, I’m not saying no one ever laughed. But if someone did, it probably wasn’t because of his act. More likely, they were laughing at him. People often told him his show was funny — just not his show. Somewhere on television that night, something was funny. That counts, right?

Colbert spent a decade scolding America to sleep, hoping the canned applause would drown out the snoring.

Let’s be serious for a moment (which is more than Colbert’s done in about a decade). Without his show lulling viewers into a state of dull leftist self-congratulation each night, we might see a nationwide spike in melatonin sales. “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” served as a free sleep aid for coastal elites who needed to be reassured — just before bed — that they were smarter than everyone else. No comfort like being tucked in and handed their favorite Squishmallow.

Melatonin for the masses

From the beginning, Colbert built his career on mocking conservatives. His original shtick on Comedy Central was a parody — a pretend conservative who was mocking real conservatives, but with just enough smugness to pass as “clever” in a faculty lounge.

It worked — for a while. But like most one-joke acts, it wore thin fast. When he made the jump to CBS, the parody turned into reality: a genuine leftist, playing the role of a leftist, telling jokes only a leftist could love — while aiming hate at conservatives.

  

Colbert wasn’t a comedian. He was an actor pretending to be a comedian, which is only slightly more honest than most modern pundits pretending to be journalists.

Bias dressed as truth

But there’s a deeper lesson here. Colbert belongs to the same cultural bubble as NPR’s president, the university diversity officer, and the late-night writers’ room packed with Ivy League graduates who somehow believe their worldview is “neutral.”

They talk a big game about identifying bias — but can’t see the deep blue (or Marxist red) lens that shapes everything they see and say. They honestly believe they’re just “telling the truth” — a truth that, conveniently, always punches right and kisses left.

That’s what made Colbert’s show feel like a parody of itself. You kept waiting for the wink, the nudge, the moment he’d break character and admit the absurdity. But it never came.

Instead, he delivered gentle laughs for Democrats — “Teehee, aren’t they quirky?” — and launched into furious monologues about Trump, DeSantis, or anyone to the right of Mitt Romney. It wasn’t satire. It was seething partisan rage, disguised as applause-sign comedy.

You wanted it to be a bit. But it wasn’t. It was just Colbert. Night after night. Until the ratings finally collapsed and put the whole sad production out of its misery.

RELATED: Stephen Colbert likens WSJ poll of Trump vs. DeSantis to a poll pitting ‘gonorrhea’ against ‘slightly more racist gonorrhea’

  Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

One shining moment

I’ll give credit where it’s due. Colbert did have one moment of brilliance — a genuine philosophical zinger. It happened years ago, back when Colbert still hosted “The Colbert Report.” His guest was none other than Lawrence Krauss — the disgraced ASU physicist who became famous for telling people the universe came from nothing (a philosophical trick so bold it somehow earned him a book deal and a speaking tour).

Krauss was on to promote his book, “A Universe from Nothing,” and Colbert got him to admit that what he’s talking about isn’t nothing, but rather something called “quantum foam.” The book’s title was blatant false advertising.

And then Colbert — clearly out of character for once — did something I still show my philosophy students. He pressed Krauss: “So you believe the universe came from nothing?” Krauss nodded. “And you believe God doesn’t exist, that God is nothing?” Another nod. Colbert paused and delivered the knockout line: “Then aren’t you really saying the universe came from God?”

Boom.

That one line did more to dismantle Krauss’ book than any academic critique ever could. It was sharp, witty, and philosophically devastating. (You can watch my analysis of that clip here.)

If only Colbert had stuck to that kind of comedy — the kind that exposes absurdity rather than reinforces it. Instead, he spent the next decade scolding America to sleep, hoping the canned applause would drown out the snoring.

Make comedy great again

The sad truth is that we haven’t seen real late-night humor in years. I recently caught a rerun of Johnny Carson, and it was like discovering a comedic oasis in the desert. Carson could poke fun at both sides of the aisle without apologizing for loving his country. He didn’t flirt with the virus of multicultural guilt or the blame-America-first bug that has infected entertainment for the last 20 years.

He was funny because he understood something Colbert never did: America, for all her flaws, is still worth laughing with — not just sneering at.

So farewell, Stephen Colbert. I’d say we’ll miss you, but we’ve already had years of practice.

Ross Douthat Makes The Case For Finding Faith

Even if there is a pathway for moving from doubt to belief in a higher power, is it worth doing?

Scientists make groundbreaking discovery of low-frequency gravitational waves that create ripples in the fabric of space-time, proving Einstein correct 100 years later



Scientists made a groundbreaking discovery of low-frequency gravitational waves that are likely from supermassive black holes that create ripples in the fabric of space-time.

In 1915, Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, in which he determined that the intense gravity of extremely massive objects warps the fabric of space-time. If these gargantuan objects collide with each other, then gravitational waves would be sent into the universe.

Gravitational waves were first discovered in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

The LIGO defines gravitational waves as "ripples in space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the universe.

"The strongest gravitational waves are produced by cataclysmic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae (massive stars exploding at the end of their lifetimes), and colliding neutron stars," the LIGO explains. "Other gravitational waves are predicted to be caused by the rotation of neutron stars that are not perfect spheres, and possibly even the remnants of gravitational radiation created by the Big Bang."

On Wednesday, scientists announced that they had finally discovered these elusive low-frequency gravitational waves – which likely confirms Einstein's theory made over 100 years ago. The discovery was made after 15 years of data collection.

Scientists from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves announced in a news release:

The groundbreaking discovery was made by scientists with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) who closely observed stars called pulsars that act as celestial metronomes. The newly detected gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time — are by far the most powerful ever measured: They carry roughly a million times as much energy as the one-off bursts of gravitational waves from black hole and neutron star mergers detected by experiments such as LIGO and Virgo.

"These are by far the most powerful gravitational waves known to exist," said Maura McLaughlin – the codirector of the NANOgrav Physics Frontiers Center. "Detecting such gargantuan gravitational waves requires a similarly massive detector, and patience."

  NEW Discovery of Gravitational Waves | NSF's Discovery Files www.youtube.com 

"It's like a choir, with all these supermassive black hole pairs chiming in at different frequencies,” said NANOGrav scientist Chiara Mingarelli. "This is the first-ever evidence for the gravitational wave background. We’ve opened a new window of observation on the universe."

Scientists describe the low-gravitational waves as making a low-pitched "hum."

"Now that we have evidence for gravitational waves, the next step is to use our observations to study the sources producing this hum," said Sarah Vigeland of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, chair of the NANOGrav detection working group.

Scientists believe the source of the low-gravitational waves is supermassive black holes crashing into each other in a death spiral.

"Those black holes are truly colossal, containing billions of suns’ worth of mass," NANOGrav explained. "Nearly all galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have at least one of the behemoths at their core. When two galaxies merge, their supermassive black holes can meet up and begin orbiting one another. Over time, their orbits tighten as gas and stars pass between the black holes and steal energy."

Luke Zoltan Kelley, a theoretical astrophysicist at Northwestern University and NANOGrav, said it is possible that the low-gravitational waves could also be created by cosmic strings, dark matter, and primordial black holes that formed soon after the Big Bang.

  Gravitational waves create a 'cosmic symphony' that scientists are tuning into www.youtube.com 

The scientists were able to find the low-gravitational waves by data collected from 67 pulsars, basically turning these pulsars into a galaxy-wide telescope.

"They closely observed pulsars, the ultra-dense remnants of massive stars that went supernova," NANOGrav said. "Pulsars act like stellar lighthouses, shooting beams of radio waves from their magnetic poles. As the pulsars rapidly spin (sometimes hundreds of times a second), those beams sweep across the sky, appearing from our vantage point on Earth as rhythmic pulses of radio waves."

"The pulses arrive on Earth like a perfectly timed metronome," the statement read. "The timing is so precise that when Jocelyn Bell measured the first pulsar radio waves in 1967, astronomers thought they might be signals from an alien civilization."

Over the 15 years of analysis, the collision of massive cosmic bodies may have disrupted the arrival of the signals from the pulsars.

"And if that pulse is a little bit late or a little bit early, then we may be able to attribute that to a gravitational wave passing through," said Jeff Hazboun, an astrophysicist at Oregon State University and a member of the NANOGrav team.

"As a gravitational wave passes between us and a pulsar, it throws off the radio wave timing," according to Phys.org. "That’s because, as Albert Einstein predicted, gravitational waves stretch and compress space as they ripple through the cosmos, changing how far the radio waves have to travel."

NPR said, "What they found is a pattern of deviations from the expected pulsar beam arrival timings that suggests gravitational waves are jiggling space-time as though it's a vast serving of Jell-O."

Popular Mechanics noted, "And here’s the key: light travels through space at a finite speed. The flashes from a pulsar at a certain distance from Earth will always hit Earth at the same intervals, because it will always take the light the same amount of time to travel from there to here. But if there’s suddenly, say, more space between the pulsar and Earth, it will take the light longer to travel from there to here, and the clock-like timing will be thrown off."

Mingarelli declared, "What’s next is everything. This is just the beginning."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

  Major Discovery of Loud Gravitational Vibrations Across The Entire Universe www.youtube.com 

Rocket Like It's 1969: Why Is NASA Going to the Moon Again?!
play icon

Rocket Like It's 1969: Why Is NASA Going to the Moon Again?!

 

What Happened When I Looked For Ancient Aliens In Roswell

A peculiar ranch incident in New Mexico nearly 75 years ago has kept UFO enthusiasts intrigued at the possible presence of alien life on Earth until this very day.