By James Poniewozik

As the CBS “Late Show” dies prematurely on May 21, Stephen Colbert will have been a late-night host for over two decades, long enough that this feels like the end of a cultural era.  But what era exactly? 

I’m loath to frame Colbert’s cancellation as “the death of late night” — that funeral has been going on for decades. The monoculture is long gone, the ratings smaller, the productions expensive. Yet the end of “The Late Show” still leaves us roughly where we were before David Letterman began the franchise in 1993, give or take a Jimmy Kimmel and sundry basic-cable shows. 

Nor can you diagnose this as audience burnout on political comedy. Colbert was the highest-rated host in his time slot for most of his run. Even if you believe his axing was “purely a financial decision” by CBS — you won’t catch me trying to convince you — his exit is reminiscent of the Smothers Brothers, whose political comedy show was a hit for CBS and got replaced by “Hee Haw” in 1969 anyway. End of an era? Maybe the era ended him. But while his run lasted, Colbert presided over an era when political TV comedy could take a side and still succeed. Or actually, two eras, which almost perfectly coincided with his two shows: one that parodied politics, one made in a time when politics became a parody of itself. 

Colbert arrived as host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” in October 2005, with an eyebrow pointed like a javelin and a fully formed thesis statement. “Stephen Colbert,” the conservative commentator Colbert had originated on “The Daily Show,” was the real Colbert’s own Bizarro reflection, a telegenic blowhard who knew nothing and said it as loud as he could. His first monologue introduced “truthiness,” a generation-defining coinage for the idea that it is more important for something to feel true than to be true. 

It was a political age’s defining critique, and perhaps its epitaph. You might not have thought, when the “Report” premiered, that the George W. Bush era was over. The president had been re-elected with a popular-vote majority and had three more years in office. Culturally, cable news was in its bunting-draped post-9/11 era, parodied in the show’s screaming-eagle intro credits. Tucker Carlson still had a show on MSNBC. 

But eras often end only in retrospect. In fall 2005, the war in Iraq was dragging on and the response to Hurricane Katrina had proved a debacle. When Colbert delivered the “truthiness” monologue — and certainly when he roasted President Bush and the media that covered him at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner — it was as sure a sign as any that the culture had turned. 

In 2008, Barack Obama, a president much more in line with Colbert’s real-life politics, won election. The nation changed course, but thanks to “the character,” as Colbert referred to his host persona, the show didn’t have to. 

The Obama presidency was a boon for conservative commentators, from Glenn Beck working his chalkboard to Sean Hannity mocking the new president for putting Dijon mustard on his hamburger. The great American hot-air machine ensured that the “Report” would never lack for material. 

What made the show enduring was that it was above all a satire of a political-media industry unconstrained by term limits. Like “The Daily Show,” it was a work of media criticism. It made fun of the imperative to defend the indefensible, to tie and gag one’s brain and follow one’s talking points right off an intellectual cliff. 

The show also kept things interesting through a series of ever-bigger comic-educational stunts (a model later followed by John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight”). Colbert tried to get on the ballot in the South Carolina presidential primary. (Because how absurd was it that you could go from hosting a TV show to the White House?) He sent viewers to edit the Wikipedia entries on elephants to illustrate “wikiality,” the idea that consensus belief in a lie could overrule facts. Most audaciously, he created an actual SuperPAC, an extended satire-seminar on the mechanisms by which money controls politics. 

In 2014, when Colbert was named to succeed Letterman at “The Late Show,” it seemed like one of those cultural handoffs in which the alternative goes mainstream. He would leave basic cable for the major leagues, becoming a normal host of a normal show in normal times. One of his first guests, it was announced, would be the early Republican presidential front-runner Jeb Bush. 

But when late-night comics make plans, God laughs hardest of all.

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