Watching the House Lights Fade

What the end of Colbert’s show says about who holds the mic

The empty Late Show set.

From my perch here in the antipodes, it feels a bit like watching the house lights fade on a distant stage, except instead of applause or an encore, all we hear is an uncomfortable silence. Last week, CBS announced it will end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in May 2026, citing financial pressures.

A perfectly boring reason…except it came days after Colbert mocked the network for coughing up what he called a $16 million “bribe” to Donald Trump’s legal team during a merger dust-up. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate voted to axe over a billion dollars in funding for the U.S. public broadcasters National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), a one-two punch on the jaw of those in that media that makes too many people think about the overall.

There’s a creeping chill to it—the kind that doesn’t storm in, but settles slowly. It’s the hush that follows when dissent is discouraged, when the lights stay dim, and the cameras are turned off for good.

Meanwhile, the defunding of NPR and PBS by the U.S. Senate is overtly political, the culmination of long-standing attacks by conservative lawmakers who see these public institutions as hostile to their agenda. Each case has its own justifications, but taken together they reflect a worrying trend: the withdrawal of support for the platforms that challenge power, question orthodoxy, and invite public reflection.

It’s a reminder that the political often dresses itself up in the language of business, but when satirists and public broadcasters come under attack, it’s not just a programming shift, it’s yet another early warning system of democracy falling quiet.

History has a grim sense of humour when it comes to this stuff. Authoritarians don’t start with tanks and uniforms, they start by pulling the mic. From Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia, from Franco to Pinochet to Mussolini, the first thing to go wasn’t freedom, it was fun. Satirists, comedians, cartoonists, they weren’t just annoying; they were dangerous. A well-placed punchline could do what a dozen manifestos couldn’t: make people see through the absurd theatre of totalitarianism.

The Nazis made joking about Hitler a crime. Under Stalin, comedians and satirists were often arrested for jokes that were deemed subversive or anti-Soviet; some sentenced to prison, labour camps, or worse, simply for refusing to toe the party line with their humour. Franco’s Spain chased satire into metaphors and murmurings. Pinochet simply switched the whole culture off, like pulling the plug on a concert mid-chorus. It’s both tragic and oddly flattering that tyrants have always feared the funny ones most.

Despite it all, laughter endured. You couldn’t always hear it, but it was there—like in Francoist Spain, where satirical lines slipped past censors in coded theatre scripts, or under Stalin’s regime, where jokes were told in hushed voices behind closed doors despite the real risk of arrest. In East Germany, whispered jokes about the Stasi became a form of resistance, a fragile but vital signal that people were still thinking, still laughing, still free in spirit. It became a secret handshake between the irreverent and the awake. But make no mistake, the risks were real as were the prospects of immediate retribution.

The repression and the ambition for total control has never left us as a species. The same old fears are concoted in new corridors of power. In Turkey, cartoonists are behind bars. In Egypt, a satirist was jailed over a joke about a hat. In China, sarcasm itself is frowned upon. Reports from 2016 suggested that North Korean authorities warned citizens against using sarcasm when speaking about the regime; a chilling indication of how deeply authoritarianism fears even the gentlest form of dissent.

A laugh suggests you’re not afraid. It punctures the pomposity. It tells everyone in earshot: the emperor’s naked, and also not very bright.

Laughter threatens authoritarian control because it disarms fear and exposes absurdity. It forges solidarity, revealing that the spectacle of power can be mocked and therefore challenged. Collective laughter sharpens clarity, emboldens resistance, and chips away at the illusion of absolute authority.

Stephen Colbert, in this light, posed a real threat to the Trump administration, not through marches or manifestos, but through nightly monologues that made power look petty, self-serving, and ridiculous. For any strongman, wannabe or otherwise, there’s no greater danger than a population laughing together at the machinery of control.

These are not just American glitches, they’re part of a broader drift. If you want to erode freedom quietly, you don’t outlaw dissent, you just make it harder to fund, harder to platform, harder to prioritise. You turn down the volume on the sharp stuff and turn up the noise on easier content. Stories that won’t ruffle proprietors, shareholders, or ministers. Slowly, satire gets swapped for lifestyle, and criticism for commentary. You don’t silence dissent, you crowd it out.

From here in Australia, the signals are getting harder to ignore. We have one of the most concentrated media markets in the democratic world, where a handful of powerful proprietors shape much of what we read, watch and hear.

It’s a system that too often rewards outrage over insight and dulls complexity into digestible talking points; performance over profundity.

Our national broadcaster, long a cornerstone of public trust, has over recent decades endured repeated funding cuts, carefully appointed boards consisting of ideologues and flunkies making it susceptible to political pressure. As a result it’s become hesitant. Fearful of drawing fire from commercial competitors, disdain from powerful lobby groups or provoking the contempt of political leaders.

What we’re left with is a media landscape that can too easily narrow the conversation, making the public a little less curious, a little more cynical, and far more vulnerable to the drift we think only happens elsewhere.

The conditions that support a vibrant public square; funding, freedom, a sense of mischief, are hard-won, and easily lost.

What’s at stake isn’t just Colbert’s monologue or American media. It’s a deeper question: who decides what voices are heard, and which ones are too inconvenient for the boardroom or the cabinet room? When satire disappears, so does one of democracy’s most honest diagnostics. The laugh isn’t trivial, it’s a warning.

We know we can’t rely on governments or media proprietors to protect these spaces. They rarely do, especially when it conflicts with their own interests or ideologies. It’s on all of us to stay awake to the signs, to speak when it matters, and to push back when rights start to quietly shrink. Democracy survives not through ceremony or sentiment, but through vigilance, and the presence of mind to act when freedoms begin to slip from view.

Protecting satire isn’t about defending jokes. It’s about defending the space where truth can still surprise us, unsettle us, and make us laugh in recognition. Because when that space closes, the silence that follows isn’t peace. It’s control.