Kamden Spies wrote to ask…
Since you're a historian of late night television, I thought you could answer this question. What do you think changed Late Night in terms of politics? Before Trump, it seemed that The Daily Show was the only show that focused heavily on politics. I know that Carson and Letterman would do political humor, but not to the extent that Meyers or Colbert do. While I think they're hilarious (particularly Seth Meyers' Closer Look segments), I'm just curious what changed Late Night.
I'd say audience response did and I'd give some credit to the thing that's changed just about everything everywhere: The Internet.
But The Daily Show wasn't the only late night show that offered it. The Colbert Report did. Bill Maher's two shows did. Saturday Night Live usually has a couple of political bits plus whatever's in their Weekend Update segment. There are a few others…and while Carson and Letterman and those guys didn't do as much of it as some guys do now, they did during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky matter. During that period, it was very hard to write a joke about anything else.
The Internet has made everything more topical. Once upon a time, newspapers went to press once a day and TV news shows happened at a few specific hours. Now, news reporting is a 24/7 thing and current events are a lot more current. It's why the late night shows no longer pick their reruns from a year back as Johnny and Merv once did. A rerun now is of a show that first aired two weeks ago. If they ran a year-old show, it would feel like they'd dredged something up from the sixties. More topical humor means more politics.
And then there's the fact that when Stephen Colbert replaced Letterman, a guy who did topical humor and who was immersed in politics replaced a guy who seemed uncomfy in that area and often half-joked about not knowing very much about it. It is widely believed in the industry that Colbert's rise to the top of the ratings had a lot to do with getting more political, which has largely meant slamming Trump. In TV, when you want to know where something came from, the answer is usually someone who got real successful doing it so everyone else felt they should do it.
