The Self-Important Feeling: Stephen Colbert and the Comedian's Dilemma

Looking back on Johnny Carson's warning about getting political

I don’t know the exact dynamics of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert getting cancelled, but Nate Silver’s reflection is my favorite treatment on it out there. I also loved Uncle Colin’s perspective on it, because it’s so centered on the comedy. Cowherd will never forgive Colbert for undermining Jon Stewart’s routine on the origins of Covid. To Cowherd, a comedy fan, Colbert’s sin was less that he was propagandistic on an important matter, and more that he let a political impulse destroy a sacred creation: The joke.

In the aftermath of the Late Show getting axed by CBS, a 40 second clip from a Johnny Carson interview with Mike Wallace spread. Before watching, I could tell that the snippet juxtaposed Carson’s refusal to take political sides against Colbert’s embrace of it. My assumption was that I was about to see some old school variation of, “Don’t turn off half your audience.” As in, practical, “Republicans buy sneakers too,” advice from an entertainer whose heart wasn’t ideology-forward in the first place.

Instead, what Johnny Carson said, albeit briefly, was far more nuanced and challenging. On adopting political stances in his Tonight Show routine, Carson said:

That’s a danger. That’s a real danger. Once you start that, you start to get that self important feeling that what you say has great import. And strangely enough, you could use that show as a forum, you could sway people. And I don’t think you should as an entertainer.

Once Carson said “self important feeling,” I figured the next move would be for the Tonight Show host to mock a celebrity’s overestimation of impact. Instead, Carson pivots to, “And strangely enough, you could use that show as a forum, you could sway people.” He follows that up with, “and I don’t think you should as an entertainer.” Carson said a lot there, and yet I want even more.

Instead of arguing that the danger is an entertainer will get politically self important and fail, Carson posits that the real danger is the entertainer will get politically self important and succeed. I find that argument fascinating. It’s a bit counterintuitive but I get it, especially after living through the 2012-2022 Twitter Era. This was a time of mass self importance from entertainers, and I do not believe we were better for it.

I’m reminded of Stephen Colbert’s big cultural success back in 2006 and I wonder if he got addicted to the feeling of influence. It’s not that the past is hard to remember—it’s that the context surrounding it is difficult to convey. Stephen Colbert's performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, the one where his satirical persona destroyed George W. Bush in person while “praising” him, was a big cultural Old Internet moment. From today’s vantage, a TV entertainer mocking a Republican president is less a big deal than the background noise of modernity. In the 2006 setting, pre social media, the mockery, televised on C-SPAN, was shocking enough to earn its own lengthy Wikipedia section.

The dinner went viral back when “going viral” was still a fairly new term. The reason it was huge wasn’t merely that Colbert savagely embarrassed W., though he did. It was that, back then, there was still a prevailing sense of propriety around the presidential office. The Correspondents' Dinner was a moment of catharsis for the politicians and media who covered them, a time when humor was to briefly bridge a status gap between ruler and critic. What Stephen Colbert did just wasn’t done. As momentary court jester, he broke a convention, publicly rubbing W.’s nose in his failing second term. It was, believe it or not, brave. It was bold in a way that trashing Trump isn’t, even if Jon Stewart and others seek to now depict a new world order where every institution fears the current leader.

I don’t think Colbert’s routine changed history, but it did catalyze a growing sense of media dissatisfaction with a presidency that had previously held tremendous sway. If I’m being objective, I don’t believe the White House Correspondents' Dinner made a significant mark on W.’s approval ratings or future policy concerns. If I was Stephen Colbert, though? Taking that chance, and reaping the shocking wellspring of cultural admiration? I’d probably think I had mattered quite a bit. I’d probably believe I’d delivered the coup de grâce to once powerful George W. Bush, back when my peers were too scared. And I’d probably chase that feeling for the rest of my career, which it appears Stephen Colbert has, to great monetary success. I will say, from the outside, he doesn’t seem very happy though.

Stephen Colbert, a comedian, probably began to believe that what he said had great import. From afar, he appears to be a very serious minded person in certain ways. As a devout Catholic, I wouldn’t be surprised if he worries more than I do about whether he’s doing right by the world. Not that you have to be religious to feel such a way. I have quite a few politically progressive friends, all secular, who carry this anxiety. I’ve got a buddy who worries about everything down to whether the shrimp he eats is sustainable. You might think I reference him here for mockery, but instead, I mostly just want to give him a hug and repeat, “It’s not your fault.” I see him carrying a burden that I don’t tote. I want him to feel free in his own actions and thoughts.

People used to be more religious, like Colbert, which served as a funnel for anxieties about being “good.” Now people worry more about transmitting the “right” politics, like Colbert. I remember, back at the height of 2020 summer madness, that a friend of my wife’s demanded to know what her husband was doing to change the world at this all important moment. “He has a platform!” the woman scolded. Where was the Black square on my Instagram? Why wasn’t I ending racialized police violence? I wasn’t there, but the conversation was relayed to me. I’m sure my wife, adroit in these matters, handled the situation well on my behalf.

And it occurred to me, when I was told, that I didn’t feel my “platform,” such as it is, to be a moral burden like that. That I rejected the premise of “platformism,” where I must neurotically seek to throw my weight behind causes or suffer esteem. That I was, according to some, arrogant, but that I wasn’t, according to myself, self important. I was just talking and mostly worried about making sense. Whatever else happens in the world is beyond my control.

But I could imagine being a different sort of person, one corrupted by that “self important” feeling. Say I was a lot more talented, my platform was far larger, and I’d famously once made a big political impact with my comedy. Let’s posit I believed the worst about the current president and felt some great moral duty to stop him. I might lose track of what my job is. I might miss how I’m now in an era where a million other people are doing what I did at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner. In believing myself essential, I might lose sight of how I’ve become irrelevant.