Nolte: Colbert and Kimmel Return from Summer Break to Prove Why Late Night Is Dying

Basement-rated Late Nighters Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert returned to work after their summer break to prove why Late Night is dying and that they are the smugs who killed it.

One can only assume that whoever wrote this did so with their pants around their ankles:

Late-night television returned to the air at almost full strength Tuesday night (The Daily Show is back next week), and, fittingly for a ferocious street fight, it was on: slashing and mocking at close quarters.

The absence of Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert for numerous weeks this summer did absolutely nothing to soften the comic assault on a President these hosts see as everything wrong and funny, the rueful version, about America.

If you joined 99.9986 percent of America in not watching Kimmel and Colbert, here’s a taste of the brilliance you missed out on.

Kimmel called the last two months of Trump’s term “non-stop craptastic.”

“You would think a person who himself has the brain of a child would be in favor of funding pediatric brain cancer research,” Kimmel said, after claiming Trump ended research into pediatric brain cancer, which is probably a hoax.

Here’s another epic howler:

“Oh you delicate, chubby little tea cup,” said Kimmel. “You want us to be cancelled because we make jokes about you? I thought you were against cancel culture. Unfortunately for Frosty the Snowflake, the only place we are going is to New York.”

Prepare your knee for some slapping…

“This is my country,” Kimmel said of the rumor he might flee to Italy after getting dual citizenship. “I have no intention of running away from it, especially because of Donald Trump. Let me tell you something: I would move into Mar-A-Lago if I could, just to drive him insane.”

As far as Colbert, his monologue (below) is simply dreadful, and it sure sounds to me like the producers are going in afterwards to boost the canned laughter….

For anyone who wants to claim I can’t laugh at Trump, then why do I find Bill Maher’s Trump jokes funny?

I’ll tell you why — because they’re funny. Bill Maher and his staff write actual jokes, not lazy applause lines.

Nevertheless, what Maher does is very different from what Late Night has become. Maher’s Real Time franchise is his own franchise, his own brand. Colbert, Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers took what was a unifying, relaxed, time-to-wind-down franchise and turned it into a leftist struggle session to preen their own virtue and affirm left-wing white women.

It’s all so lazy and predictable, which is the death of comedy.

John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.