AND THEN THERE WERE FOUR

 

Oh, no! After this week, only four middle-aged
white guys will tell the same jokes.

It's now the final week of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. And there hasn't been such an open display of celebrity mourning since John Lennon's death. 

Me, I'm more concerned if my daughter's Master's Degree in Urban Planning will be considered useless in the near A.I. future than whether a guy who made $15 million per annum is going to survive.

Tom & Dick were cancelled for
your sins.

Colbert -- comfortably ensconced in his Montclair mansion -- will spend zero minutes worrying about where his next job is coming from, or how he will pay the mortgage or future medical bills.  Not when he and his son are writing the next Lord of the Rings movie. 

And certainly not when he'll have plenty of other offers, like maybe a podcast with a worldwide audience where he can say anything he wants. Gee, I sure wish the Smothers Brothers had those options when CBS gave them the heave-ho after just two-and-a-half years. (Thanks to Johnny Carson, every late-night host feels it's their right to sit at their desks longer than most marriages last. Certainly Johnny's, anyway.)

We're told that CBS cancelled Colbert for political reasons. What we don't hear as much is that he turned down a five-year renewal in 2023, opting instead for a three-year extension. 

Those three years have passed. Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like he got what he wanted. If those mourners at the Late Show funeral gave it a few minutes thought, they might come around to my belief that it was the best thing that could have happened to their hero. Colbert himself even told People magazine he wonders if CBS “saved my life” because “it takes a lot of bone marrow to do the show every day, and now I’ll be stepping down with enough time, enough energy to do other things that I want to do." 

Oh yeah, he's hurting.

Late-night TV is the video version of the Titanic. And rather than drowning in ice-cold water, Colbert gets to continue his voyage on another ship that will get him to his destination in one piece and leave him richer in the long run. We should all be so lucky when we lose our jobs. 

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