Steven Colbert is back on late night television, this time off of cable and on network television.
He has retained his witty and sarcastic style, as can be seen in his monologue from September 21, where he made fun of “fake colleges for money”, and declared he now had fake degrees from fake colleges on his website for free. Interested students willing to skip the application process to fake colleges can go to his website and print one out and display it with all the pride it entails.
“The comedy seems the same to me,” senior Joshua Abbott said.
Colbert has adopted a Jimmy Fallon-esque interview style, as can be seen in his interview with Emily Blunt on the fifteenth of September.
“Steven Colbert, he’s your regular sort of talk show host. But he’s also doing what’s kind of common nowadays; he’s combining comedy with journalism in an effort to create something that’s appealing to the masses, something that the people want,” senior Daniel Glover said.
Colbert replaced David Letterman as the host of the Late Show after signing off of his show on Comedy Central this last winter. Colbert was replaced by Larry Wilmore, who now hosts the Nightly Show, which replaced the Colbert Report.
“ So, what’s my opinion of him no longer being on Comedy Central?…I don’t think it affected my opinion of him that much,” senior Richard Ohr said.
Colbert comes into a long tradition of late night television show hosts, which goes back to the 1950’s with people like Steve Allen and Jack Paar. However, late night television matured under Johnny Carson (link is to a PBS documentary, if you’re interested), who hosted the Tonight Show for thirty years.
“If you ask about Colbert, he feels like the direct inheritor for Carson,” said English Teacher John Behm, who worked in the advertising business for fifteen years.
Carson is also the standard for late night television, and he developed the format that other hosts usually ended up following.
“Why change the format? As a comparison, look at a sitcom. Look at I Love Lucy from 1953 or so, take — I don’t know — Friends, Seinfeld, and then something that was on last week, not a whole lot of difference,” Behm said. “In terms [ ] of the nature of the program, how [it’s] structured, and how [late night hosts] present it, I don’t see a lot of structural changes, and the personalities are a little different, but it’s the same kind of television.”
In other words, Colbert fits in nicely.
Another new host for a old favorite is Trevor Noah for the Daily Show. John Stewart, the show’s host for several years aired his last episode back in August. Noah’s first show was on Monday, September 28. May he head the ship of the Daily Show well.