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When CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in July, long-held fears were confirmed: The late-night talk show was indeed gone — for good this time — with its embalmed body seen for the last time before its burial. Colbert’s show ended amid unique political circumstances, as CBS’s parent company, Paramount, and President Donald Trump reached a multimillion-dollar legal settlement while the company attempted to merge with Skydance Media. Was Colbert, a vocal Trump critic, fired because of an informal deal between Paramount and the president? Many doubted it. (The merger was cleared by the Federal Communications Commission shortly after The Late Show was canceled.) But the demise of the late-night talk show as a whole was likely inevitable, regardless of any presidential intervention. What the medium once produced exclusively in a single, glamorous package—stand-up monologues, current events coverage, celebrity interviews, cheap pranks and game shows, live music performances—is now available online in hyper-specific, often higher-quality abundance. Variety shows are losing their value in this choice marketplace, where interests and preferences are algorithmically delivered to us at any moment. Why would a top-tier comedian even want to host a late-night show? Working within the confines of corporate cable, having accepted a narrow, formulaic format for their material, and being forced to interview celebrity guests, why not instead get a few stand-up gigs on Netflix and host a podcast, which offers comparable salaries and far greater creative freedom?
It’s telling that after the recent presidential election, as the left tried to find its own version of Joe Rogan—a comically masculine voice capable of representing progressive and Democratic interests to disaffected, apolitical audiences—no one paid attention to the hosts of late-night talk shows. Weren’t they mostly straight white men telling jokes and debating politics on a national stage? Why weren’t their voices resonating with the audience they wanted? Who were they really resonating with? Were they really funny? The obvious answer is that late-night talk shows, with the possible exception of HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, have become emblematic of the ugly trope of corporate liberalism. Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and Kimmel, and even the more liberal Seth Meyers, criticize Trump, but they have also become, willy-nilly, mouthpieces for monocultural conformity, and their humor and political commentary have suffered for it. Donald Trump is a Cheeto, they chorus before welcoming Benson Boone on stage to perform a backflip. The commercial realities of hosting a network TV show seem to preclude the kind of caustic, cutting commentary and off-the-wall humor that viewers turn to YouTube and podcasts for.
Adam Friedland is not a late-night talk show host, and he’s certainly not the Joe Rogan of the left. But could his YouTube talk show, The Adam Friedland Show, be the future of the format? At first glance, it seems unlikely. Friedland, 38, is a bumbling, uncouth character, an edgelord comedian who previously hosted a podcast with Stavros Chalkias and Nick Mullen called Cum City. One of the most successful comedy podcasts of the past decade, Cum City was full of raunchy, conversational anti-humor and wild, improvised scenarios, such as Boy Meets World’s Mr. Feeny seducing and slut-shaming right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro. Everything was “gay,” everyone was a “wimp” or a “moron,” and no racial stereotypes or accents were off limits. Yet despite their vulgarity, the hosts of Sperm City were not—and I suppose you’ll have to believe me—hateful or violent in their politics. There was a Lynchian quality to the podcast, a funhouse-level absurdism that offset its overtly offensive nature. Unlike many of the comedians in Rogan’s world, whose jokes about marginalized people tend to mask genuine bigotry, the hosts of Sperm City were Bernie Sanders voters who supported universal health care and trans rights. Their raunchy humor was meant to anger the stuffy bureaucrats who took everything at face value, unable to distinguish satire from hate speech. But the podcast, despite its hosts' obvious leftist leanings, was resolutely apolitical, as Friedland summed up in a 2017 tweet: “Sperm City is not a socialist podcast, it's not a fascist podcast, it's a podcast about being gay with a dad.”
Friedland's role in “Cum City” was to be a humiliated bore. “I
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