The Unceremonious End of an Era: Stephen Colbert’s Cancellation Ignites Fiery Critique from Gutfeld and Kelly

The news landed like a lead balloon in the late-night television landscape: Stephen Colbert’s show, a supposed institution, was abruptly canceled. While official statements cited “financial reasons”—a convenient catch-all for any failing venture—the true post-mortem began not in network boardrooms, but on the airwaves of Fox News, where Greg Gutfeld and Megan Kelly delivered a blistering, no-holds-barred dissection of Colbert’s legacy. Their commentary was less a reaction and more a ruthless roast, a full-blown intellectual demolition of a career they viewed as more noise than substance, culminating in a theatrical dragging of Colbert off stage, one sarcastic jab at a time.

Gutfeld, with his signature blend of biting humor and unvarnished candor, wasted no time in dismantling the network’s official narrative. “I love how they claim it’s a financial reason, but everything is a financial reason, right?” he quipped, drawing a parallel to a restaurant serving “lousy food” that closes due to “financial reasons,” rather than admitting the culinary shortcomings. He highlighted the unprecedented nature of the cancellation, noting that CBS chose to “close up” the entire late-night slot rather than simply replacing Colbert. “Imagine being a chef, you know, you’re such a bad chef that they cancel the whole show,” Gutfeld mused, underscoring the perceived depth of Colbert’s failure.

Megan Kelly, armed with her characteristic precision and an almost prosecutorial demeanor, echoed Gutfeld’s sentiments, dismissing the notion that the “timing and optics” of the cancellation were “terrible.” “Not true. Not true. Not true. The timing and optics are perfect,” she asserted, pointing out that only those on the left might perceive it as retaliatory, perhaps linked to Colbert’s criticism of CBS over a $16 million settlement with Donald Trump concerning an edited interview. Kelly’s critique cut deeper, targeting the very essence of Colbert’s comedic approach. “You can’t do a comedy show and a sermon at the same time,” she declared, articulating a widely held sentiment that Colbert’s humor had become inextricably intertwined with, and often overshadowed by, his political preachiness.

The Slow-Motion Nosedive: From Satire to Self-Righteousness

Colbert’s cancellation, according to Kelly and Gutfeld, wasn’t just predictable; it was “overdue,” akin to “a bad joke that kept dragging on.” The real surprise, they argued, was that it took network executives so long to acknowledge that “the emperor wasn’t just naked, but completely out of punchlines, coasting on pure smug fumes.” For years, Colbert, in their view, had “masqueraded as a comedian,” dishing out “reheated Twitter takes dressed up as monologues,” powering his show not with genuine wit, but with a “self-satisfaction strong enough to fuel a private jet.” The consensus from the Fox News duo was clear: this was not the makings of a “late night legacy,” but rather “America’s longest running televised eye roll.”

The decline, they contended, was a “slow motion nosedive a decade in the making.” There was a time, particularly during his tenure at Comedy Central, when Colbert was genuinely sharp, his persona delivering “real satire, actual edge, and the kind of humor that didn’t sound like it was curated by a book club of overeducated wine moms.” However, upon his transition to late-night network television, he seemingly “followed the classic mid-career sellout script,” trading his incisive bite for “bumper sticker platitudes.” His entire show, they observed, “morphed into one long exhausted sigh.” If “self-righteousness ever had a laugh track,” Gutfeld suggested, “it would be called The Stephen Colbert Show.”

Kelly highlighted the performative nature of Colbert’s comedy, describing his monologues as “moral TED talks with dim lighting and canned clapping from an audience that looked like they accidentally wandered in from a Whole Foods parking lot.” The laughter, she argued, wasn’t a genuine response to humor but rather a collective affirmation of shared ideological beliefs. “People didn’t laugh because he was funny. They laughed because they agreed. That’s not comedy. That’s group therapy with ad breaks.”

The Critique: Surgical Precision Meets Pure Combustion

Megan Kelly’s approach to dissecting Colbert’s downfall was described as “surgical sarcasm,” slicing through the facade to expose what she perceived as a “personality vacuum and echo chamber dressed up as late night entertainment.” She didn’t merely revel in his cancellation; she framed it as a “cautionary tale,” a case study in what happens when a performer “mistakes ideological agreement for actual talent.” Her analysis suggested that once that ideological agreement inevitably fades, “so does the applause.” Kelly pointedly noted that Colbert’s inability to sustain a show without “leaning on every tired trope in the progressive comedian starter kit”—including “smug disdain for the middle class,” “obligatory Walmart jokes,” and “pro-clutching over every Supreme Court ruling like it ruined his bottomless mimosa brunch”—ultimately led to his demise.

Greg Gutfeld, in contrast to Kelly’s surgical precision, brought “pure combustion” to the critique. He treated Colbert’s cancellation like a “demolition derby,” finding satisfaction as “each dented piece of credibility crashed to the ground.” Having witnessed Colbert’s repeated attempts to be “funnier than a plank of wood,” Gutfeld was not shocked by the axe falling, but rather “satisfied”—a satisfaction born from watching someone “juggle smugness and irrelevance for so long, you’re amazed they didn’t pull something.”

Gutfeld didn’t even need to construct elaborate arguments; he simply hit play on what he termed Colbert’s “greatest misses.” From “cringe-worthy vaccine dance” to “cemented comedy bits” and “fake presidential addresses that confused satire with jazz hands and headlines,” the evidence, he implied, spoke for itself. He characterized Colbert’s interviews as “painfully flat, low energy exchanges that made car dealership balloon men seem lively,” likening them to “someone reading a Wikipedia page while blinking SOS in Morse code.” The desk itself, Gutfeld observed, evolved from a host’s prop into a “sanctimonious pulpit.”

The Oracle vs. The Comedian: A Brand of Humor Lost

Somewhere along his journey, Gutfeld argued, Colbert “stopped being a comedian and crowned himself an oracle,” one “with an Ivy League degree and a simmering disdain for anyone wearing an American flag pin without irony.” His brand of humor, in this assessment, ceased to be about generating genuine laughter and instead became about eliciting nods of self-approval from an audience convinced that “laughter itself was a form of activism.” The punchlines, Gutfeld contended, sounded more like “essay titles,” punctuated by “forced chuckles and studio applause.”

The financial disparities were not lost on Gutfeld either. He highlighted the vast difference in reach and resources between Colbert’s show and his own, noting that CBS, with its nearly 300 million American viewers, failed to retain an audience despite having “200 staffers” compared to his own show, which “employ[s] nothing but teenage runaways.”

Megan Kelly’s final indictment of Colbert’s late-night tenure was a comprehensive torching of the “entire late night playbook”—the canned laughter, the rehearsed interviews, and the “hollow virtue signaling passed off as edgy spontaneity.” She articulated what many silently thought but were too polite to voice: Colbert was not entertaining; he was “predictable.” And in the unforgiving world of comedy, predictability is, as Kelly underscored, “a death sentence.” He was, in her analogy, “like a magician with one tired trick, and by year six, even the rabbit wanted out with a therapist and a union rep in tow.”

Gutfeld, meanwhile, continued to laugh his way through the wreckage, viewing Colbert’s fall not as a sudden collapse but as a “slow, painful unraveling in full public view, like watching a soufflé collapse in prime time.” The ratings plummeted, viewers tuned out, and advertisers, he observed, “avoided the time slot like it had bad credit.” Yet, Colbert, in Gutfeld’s estimation, “kept smiling, shrugging, and doubling down on the same smug, stiff brand of humor that got him there in the first place”—a brand of humor he deemed “about as funny as a TED talk on tax reform.”

Behind the scenes, the transcript suggests, network executives were “sweating bullets as the ratings sank lower than sea level.” Despite investing heavily—”bigger budgets, top tier guests, flashy props, even a dancing syringe”—the audience continued to drift away, like “fans at a concert where the headliner is just reading Prius bumper stickers.” They tried everything, Gutfeld concluded, “except asking the one question that really mattered: Is this still funny?” The answer, for years, had been a “painfully obvious no.”

The cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s show, as framed by Greg Gutfeld and Megan Kelly, was not merely a network decision but the culmination of a comedic trajectory that veered from sharp satire into self-serving preachiness. Their unvarnished critique paints a picture of a late-night host who, in their estimation, lost touch with the essence of comedy, ultimately leading to an unceremonious exit from the television landscape.