Culture
Colbert Praises The Party As CBS Calls Him A Cab
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
Stephen Colbert, a man currently between television commitments in the way that a parachute is currently between disasters, arrived at the Emmy Awards on Monday evening and delivered what witnesses are describing as a remarkably upbeat assessment of an industry that recently asked him to please collect his things.
"I think that late night is just as funny and just as vital as it ever has been," Colbert told the assembled audience of writers, directors, producers and network executives, several of whom had personally signed the paperwork terminating his program. The audience applauded, which is what audiences do when they are not sure what else to do.
The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which ran for ten years on CBS, was cancelled earlier this year as part of the network's ongoing strategic initiative of not paying for things. Colbert's final episode aired in May. The time slot has since been reassigned to programming that CBS believes will perform similarly, which tells you something about what CBS believes.
Colbert also assured the room that free speech in America is, by his reckoning, alive and well. He offered his own cancellation as supporting evidence for this position, which is the kind of logic that sounds air-tight until you try to sleep.
Mark Cuban, who was seated three tables away and had not been asked, told a nearby reporter that he found Colbert's resilience "genuinely inspiring" and that "the entertainment landscape is always evolving," which is something people say when they want to describe a catastrophe using the vocabulary of a motivational poster.
Colbert, to his considerable credit, has not appeared to notice that his situation is in any way ironic. He smiled. He waved. He spoke warmly about the craft of late night comedy in the present tense, as a man still practicing it, rather than in the past tense, as a man describing a neighbourhood where he used to live before the building was converted into condominiums.
Sources inside the Ed Sullivan Theater, which is now being used for something else, confirm that Colbert's dressing room nameplate was removed sometime in late spring and replaced with a laminated sign reading STORAGE B.
Free speech, for those keeping score at home, is the principle that the government cannot silence you. CBS is not the government. CBS is a company, and companies are free to decide, at any time, that your particular speech will no longer be subsidised at the rate of approximately sixty million dollars per year. This is also free speech, technically, in the sense that the word "free" does not always mean what the context implies.
Colbert said he has no plans to slow down, which is a sentence that is easiest to say when someone else has already stopped you.
The cab is idling outside. He gave it five stars.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/stephen-colbert-the-late-show-free-speech-emmys-1235626775/