PITCH-PERFECT
The Colbert finale was brilliant, and proof again that the arts will save us and be here long after you-know-who is gone ...
I’m admittedly not much of a late night talk show guy anymore. Used to be, I’d get home from a hectic day in the newsroom after putting the newspaper to bed, and click on Johnny Carson to decompress and wolf down a late dinner.
There were the Lettermans, and O’Briens, and Lenos who followed, but with my newspaper days over my late-night habits were no longer practical.
Besides, in these boisterous days of the Internet, I can always find short clips of the best that these funny folks are offering.
So last night when I was still kicking around the house after watching my NY Knicks win their playoff tilt, I decided to extend my evening by clicking into Stephen Colbert’s late night finale.
I have always been a Colbert fan, and think he might be the most clever of all the people who have stuffed their words inside a microphone for all of us to hear. His takedown of George W. Bush during the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner was one of the more artful, clever pieces of comedic surgery ever performed on a sitting president.
Bush had no idea he had been the main course and thoroughly devoured at the dinner until Colbert was wrapping up his satirical feast and moving on to dessert.
At the time, Colbert was known best as portraying an over-the-top Conservative blowhard who could have credibly inhabited any of the so-called news chairs that are stuffed in front of those toxic cameras at Fox.
He was MAGA before MAGA ever existed.
The arts have the superpower to reflect where we are, where we’ve been, and where we are going.
When Colbert ascended to the CBS’ The Late Show chair replacing the great David Letterman in 2015, we finally got a sense of who he truly is. His art ripened and became sweeter. He became a necessary voice that spoke to these truly sour times in America, in an often satirical, heartfelt way.
He’s a good and decent man, at a time good and decent men have never been needed more. Colbert knows the arts are the one thing that can save us all, and in fact are saving us right now, good people.
Artists have always provided a diversion, while deftly painting a reflection of the times we are living in. Whether through music, film, TV programs, books, paintings, or even the graffiti on a subway car, they give us the sustenance to carry on.
Often when I am just too damn depressed to process one more terrible thing, I will find an old comfy show like Seinfeld, and tune out and tune in, because I just know it will make me laugh no matter how many times I have watched.
Sometimes when I am kicking around the house in a hurtful fog, I will plug in some Beatles because they filled me up through my youth, and still feed me now as I grow older.
So when Paul McCartney was Colbert’s final guest Thursday night, I cried a little. It was too sad and wonderful to process. So much brilliance in such a tight proximity.
The Beatles make me forever happy. I could spend 3,000 column inches gushing on their importance in my life. Their music takes me back to hard times and great times. It fills the holes, makes me weep, and lifts me up.
That is what the arts do.
During the entirety of his clever finale which was stuffed full of cameos by Hollywood’s finest, and music’s elite …. Colbert never mentioned you-know-who once, because I believe he wanted us all to remember that you-know-who will be gone soon enough. The arts, however, will burn bright and strong forever outshining all the destructive you-know-whos of this world.
This is why those you-know-whos hate them so much.
They are evil men who lack any depth, and have cowardly submitted to their worst instincts, while trying to inflict their pain on the rest of us.
They are dead inside. They can’t hear the music, because first you have to feel it.
The arts, as always, will handle you-know-who’s legacy, and there isn’t a damn thing he can do about it, which is why he fixates on meaningless, lifeless things with his grotesque name scribbled on them.
Canceling Colbert was spitting into the wind.
His legacy is intact, and has only been strengthened. It will carry him ever higher to whatever comes next. Colbert is one of America’s greatest artists, and while he’s made it plain he’d have preferred the cancellation not happened, I’m sure relishes the challenge of filling a blank canvas with whatever brilliance comes next from his beating heart and clever mind.
You-know-who on the other hand …
The arts have never been more important. Lucky for us, they are everywhere.
Celebrate them.
Thank you, Stephen Colbert, Paul McCartney, and all the artists out there.
It’s time for all of us to take this sad song and make it better.
(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.)
(That’s an AP photo of Paul McCartney and Stephen Colbert in Thursday night’s The Late Show finale.)
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That effusive expression of joy we saw in Colbert/McCartney and troupe performing Hello Goodbye and the way the crowd engaged in that joy made me cry. It is why the arts will remain long after authoritarianism has died out.
My wife and I always watch the opening of The Late Show, but through the magic of DVR, we watch the entire episode the following day, over lunch. Colbert had a wonderful interviewing style, and the show seldom disappointed. Sadly, this is just one more, in an ever-growing list, of things Americans enjoyed that Donald Trump has broken.