Standup comedy is not for the faint-of-heart. It ranks among the most difficult activities I’ve ever attempted. After talking my way onto a stage in a small venue in Brooklyn, with an audience of just a few dozen people, I learned the pain of bombing in front of a live audience. So, it’s easy to understand how late-night host Stephen Colbert succumbed to temptation to take the easy way out.

Getting people to laugh on cue requires good timing, good delivery, and a kind of elusive magic that’s difficult to access reliably. Getting people to clap for badmouthing Donald Trump is a far easier task. I stopped watching Colbert as he relied more on that crutch to guarantee applause from his Trump-hating fans.

In the golden era of pre-Trump comedy, Colbert appeared on Comedy Central after John Stewart’s Daily Show. Back then, Colbert’s show The Colbert Report functioned like a stray French-fry at the bottom of an otherwise empty bag: It was welcome after completing the main meal, but was not something you would go to a lot of trouble to find.

Colbert was moderately talented, but lacked Stewart’s comedic genius, and he never really recovered from abandoning his initial formula of imitating an incredibly stupid and narrow-minded conservative. The mock conservative character he played on The Colbert Report scored cheap laughs by depicting a right-winger spewing garbled facts and mixed metaphors. But he couldn’t take that character with him when he left Comedy Central in 2014 to host CBS’s Late Show.

The trouble that dogged Colbert after leaving Comedy Central was predictable. While his mock conservative character was occasionally funny and relatable, his actually personality—a conventional, smug, Trump-hating liberal—wasn’t. Since the laughs were harder to come by, Colbert resorted to chasing applause through partisan propaganda. The more his show became an infomercial for the Democratic Party, the less funny he was.

Talk shows get canceled all the time. Long-running multi-decade legacy shows are the exception, not the rule. People get bored of the same comedy formula after a while. That’s particularly true when the formula merely generates clapping instead of laughter.

Yet the left’s reaction to Colbert’s cancellation has been revealing. None of them have dared to defend Colbert’s competence as a comedian. The complaints center instead around the alleged “censorship” of his viewpoint, which is just a constant stream of Trump bashing for the benefit of those afflicted by Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). As if that’s hard to come by. In other words, they’re just upset over the loss of yet another organ of leftist power and influence.

At his apex during the Colbert Report years, Colbert could occasionally influence conversations around the watercooler and dinner table. That hasn’t been true for more than a decade. Some allege that Trump uses his influence to make it undesirable to platform rabid anti-Trump partisans. Maybe. But if Colbert were funny, he would still have a job.

Despite the best efforts of Colbert, National Public Radio, The New York Times, the Biden Justice Department, USAID, and thousands of other captured institutions and public figures, Trump won the 2024 election. The popular vote went to a candidate they called a rapist, a convicted felon, a serial liar, a colluder with Russia, and a Nazi sympathizer. Are these qualities the public was seeking in a president? Of course not. The public has come to regard all the ad hominem attacks against Trump as politically motivated nonsense meant to kneecap popular opinion and support elitists like Colbert. After watching the government try to imprison Trump, imprison election protestors, and meddle in domestic politics through censorship and intimidation, it’s no longer possible to pretend otherwise.

Colbert was part of an effort to saturate Americans with anti-Trump propaganda at every possible turn, on every possible platform. That saturation has led to the American people tuning out the smears. The constant attacks have become tedious, dated, and unfashionable outside of the shrinking TDS bubble.

Like so many other comedians and journalists, Colbert took the easy way out instead of applying himself to his craft. His skills and credibility degraded as he slowly lost the ability to do anything but take cheap shots at Trump. Fewer and fewer viewers are tuning in to watch Colbert pump up the next anti-Trump hoax or repeat the same tired narratives. He’s predictable and boring. His departure is good for both comedy and politics, and he will not be missed.