Of all the crude, petty, nasty, morally vacuous little things President Trump has done in his second term, bullying CBS into canceling Stephen Colbert’s late-night comedy show most transparently demonstrates this emperor has no clothes. Picture the man at a political rally pumping his fists to the strains of “YMCA” as he performs a strip tease, and you get the general idea of how it lands with me.
Colbert is more than a target of opportunity for Trump’s performative ire, and he’s more than a comedian. As public figures from Springsteen and Bette Midler to former President Obama made it clear, Cobert is a voice for what we used to call common human decency. It will fall silent, at least on CBS, this week.David Smith, Washington bureau chief for The Guardian, summed up the reaction like this in a story headlined “‘He had a unique ability to be human: late-night TV says goodbye to Stephen Colbert”:
Colbert, 62, has provided a nightly antidote for millions of viewers feeling discombobulated at the end of another day in Donald Trump’s dystopia. He cut through the malign chaos to reassure them that no, it was not them going mad but the world around them. And he offered a contrast in character: where Trump is vainglorious, Colbert is irreverent; where Trump is narcissistic, Colbert exudes empathy; where Trump is indecent, Colbert manifests decency to the core.
No wonder he triggers poor Donald Trump!
If you’ll allow me to get all English major-y for a minute, Colbert does satire. And satire, as M.H. Abrams’ magisterial Dictionary of Literary Terms reminds us, “has usually been justified, by those who practice it, as a corrective of human vice and folly” (353). Abrams quotes Jonathan Swift, the 18th-century English satirist, speaking of himself in an ironic obit, “malice never was his aim […] His satire points at no defect, / But what all mortals may correct.”
Trump, whom no one has accused of being overly literary, didn’t take the hint. At various times he has opined on social media: “Stephen is running on hatred and fumes ~ A dead man walking! CBS should, ‘put him to sleep,’ NOW, it is the humanitarian thing to do!” And about late-night TV comedy in general: “If Network NEWSCASTS, and their Late Night Shows, are almost 100% Negative to President Donald J. Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party, shouldn’t their very valuable Broadcast Licenses be terminated? I say, YES!”
While Trump has presented nightly defects for a latter-day Jonathan Swift to correct, Smith of the Guardian’s Washington bureau suggests there’s a depth to Colbert’s comedy that transcends satire. Says Smith:
Colbert offered more than mockery. There was also a moral anchor in the monologue that despaired of Trump but never despaired of America, the sensitive interviews with everyone from Anderson Cooper to John Oliver and from Bernie Sanders to Neil deGrasse Tyson, the references to his Catholic faith, the lack of bitterness about his own sacking and a recurring segment with his wife Evie McGee Colbert, an advertisement for how a marriage can age like a fine wine. [Link in the original.]
I hope I can be forgiven for suspecting this kind of nuance sails right over Trump’s head. More to my liking is Heidi Schlumpf, longtime senior correspondent for the Catholic magazine Commonweal, senior correspondent, who finds more humor in The Cobert Report, an earlier Comedy Central show in which from 2005 to 2014 he “highlighted the hypocrisy of right-wing blowhards through his alternative persona, an only slightly exaggerated version of the real-life Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh,” but finds more humanity, even a prophetic voice, in his current role for CBS. Schlumpf explains:
While Colbert’s satire show was funnier, I actually prefer the real Stephen Colbert to his parody persona. It reveals his authentic values of honesty, integrity, justice, compassion, and human dignity—many of which clearly come from the Catholic faith he grew up with as the youngest of eleven children and which he continues to practice as an adult. There’s no doubt he has helped put a positive face on liberal Catholicism, but his influence goes beyond the fact that he has taught Sunday school at his parish and met with Pope Francis. (I maintain, however, that his liturgical dance to “The King of Glory” is his funniest performance ever—something only a Catholic who grew up in the 1960s and ’70s could know to mock.) [Link in the original.]
Trump pretends to discern “anti-Christian bias” in American popular culture, but in bullying Colbert off the air he is silencing an authentic Catholic voice. I’m not Catholic, but it is that prophetic voice — in which the comedian speaks truth to power — that I will miss the most when Colbert’s show goes dark.
Not only does he ground his satire in a sense of the common good, as Schlumpf points out in a kind of eulogy for his show; he is close to Fr. James Martin of the Jesuit magazine America, a author whose writing has been crucial to my spiritual formation. Colbert named him the Colbert Report’s “official chaplain,” and appeared on Martin’s podcast The Spiritual Life to discuss his own faith. “I cannot remove that from me,” he said, “any more than I can remove the marble from a statue.”
Fr. Martin has also been a frequent guest on the Late Show, sometimes to plug his books and sometimes to spread the word on Colbert’s platform. When a native Chicagoan was named Pope Leo XIV last summer, for example, Colbert invited Martin on the show. “He’s not going to be afraid to speak his mind,” said Martin, exercising another kind of prophetic vision.
Interesting! Especially coming so early in Leo’s pontificate.
But I want to circle back around and focus on what Heidi Schlumpf said about Colbert and liturgical dance. It’s not really my cup of tea, but I’ve seen it performed, chiefly at an ethnically diverse non-denominational church in Springfield. So I was curious. I followed Schlumpf’s link and found a grainy YouTube clip that shows Colbert dancing in what appears to be a schoolroom to “The King of Glory Comes,” a 1970s Catholic folk hymn. At first viewing, I couldn’t tell whether it was satire, parody or slapstick. But Colbert is quite a hoofer! That much was apparent.
A couple of additional Google searches established the scene was from a Comedy Central sitcom called Strangers with Candy that aired in 1999 and 2000. According to Wikipedia, my go-to source for all matters theological, the series purported to tell the story of Jerri Blank, played by Amy Sedaris, “a 46-year-old woman who, after living as a prostitute and drug addict, decides to go back to high school and start doing things the right way.” A good deal of the satire was directed at “after-school specials,” according to another Wikipedia page, late afternoon network TV shows aimed at teenagers and intended to be morally uplifting.
“Tonally, Strangers with Candy uses surreal humor to satirize after school specials and the sanitized, saccharine advice those shows would give to kids,” says Wikipedia. “The show altered the lessons so the principal character would always do the wrong thing.” Central to its blend of comic genres was a certain ambivalence about what the :right thing” might be. A few years later, in 2003, Colbert told the Chicago Tribune (as quoted later by Wikipedia), part of the humor came from the ambiguity of moral choices:
Our rule was, if it makes us laugh, we put it in the script. There was not a single thing said by a character in that show that was right. Every choice was the wrong moral choice. Because of the freedom Comedy Central allowed us, we said and did things that were outrageous and extreme
Also very much a part of the shtick were dance numbers. Says Wikipedia, in terms that leave me wondering how it all fit together:
Jerri tries to do things the right way but always ends up learning the wrong lesson. Her hijinks often involve, either directly or indirectly, history teacher Chuck Noblet [Colbert’s character] and his secret lover art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck [played by Paul Dinello]. Every episode features a warped theme or moral lesson and ends with the cast and other featured actors from the episode dancing.
The show was canceled after its second season, but it took on a life of its own. Wikipedia says it became a cult classic. At a Late Show performance in 2020, an audience member asked Colbert, “How did you develop the King of Glory dance?”
“Wow,” he replied, tongue in cheek, “there’s some emotionally disturbed people here. You’d have to have had a little bit of a weird childhood to enjoy that show.” He continued:
We would end every show by dancing in the credits, and we just didn’t have anyone one night. So I said, ah, I’ll just go out there and sing ‘The King of Glory’ because it was a cult, it was an episode based on the cult. So I ujust got out there, and I did [breaking into the song and dance steps], ‘The King of Glory comes, the nation rejoices […]’ If you want to call that ‘developed’ — how I developed that, we were desperate, it was late, somebody had to go out there and just dance.
In any event, the show became a cult classic and Colbert’s dance shtick continues to delight audiences. According to Google’s AI Overview, another convenient source of the conventional wisdom, Colbert still “occasionally performs this interpretive routine to poke fun at 1970s ‘guitar Masses’ and church dance culture.” Adds AIO:
The dance originated during his time on the cult-parody comedy series Strangers with Candy, where his character, Chuck Noblet, sang and danced to the hymn during the show’s closing credits. Because he was a devout Catholic, the gag resonated deeply with audiences and went on to become a staple bit in his live shows and public appearances.
I like to get verification for anything I learn from AI, and I found it in the tone of a 2019 article for Religion News Service written by Laura Turner, a California free-lancer who also contributes to a Christianity Today blog called Her.meneutics. She noted that Colbert’s dance shtick was as much a part of Holy Week as Maundy Thursday and the Easter vigil. It isn’t so much what she says as the way she says it — down to her hesitation about whether to capitalize the word “church” that conveys more than passing familiarity with the liturgy.
If you’re around the church (Church?) much these days, you know we are at the outset of Holy Week, the week when we remember the death and resurrection of Jesus. Many different churches have different ways of celebrating this significant occasion–some hold services to remember the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday; some refrain from lighting candles or saying “Alleluia” until the night before Easter; and others incorporate the ancient and sacred tradition of liturgical dance.
One song that celebrates the return of Jesus–ahem, the King of Glory–is called “King of Glory.” It’s a folk tune written in 1966 and often sung on Palm Sunday, which we just passed last weekend. It isn’t a terribly well-known song, which is the case for many folk hymns, I suppose, but at least one important American figure knew it well enough to share his own liturgical dance, choreographed especially for such a time as this. So, on this Monday of Holy Week, enjoy Stephen Colbert dancing and singing to “King of Glory.” It makes, gloriously, no sense.
I’d say it makes, gloriously (although a bit ambivalently), a lot of sense. In its slapdash way, I’d even say the ambiguity of the show’s treatment of moral choices — how do you find the “right thing” anyway? — points the way to Colbert’s faith in the present time.
Links and Citations
M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 10th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2012). PDF available online on Bildungsportal Sachen website.
Alexx Altman-Devilbiss, “Trump slams Colbert, calls him ‘dead man walking’ and demands CBS ‘put him to sleep’.” ABC 3340 News, Dec. 24, 2025 https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/president-donald-trump-slams-late-night-host-stephen-colbert-calls-him-dead-man-walking-and-demands-cbs-put-him-to-sleep-broadcast-licenses.
Stephen Colbert, interview with Fr. James Martin, SJ, and Maggi Van Dorn, “The Spiritual Life,” America: The Jesuit Review, YouTube, July 7, 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p9Hx43P5yE.
__________. “Stephen’s Audience Q&A: How I Became The King Of Glory,” The Late Show, Feb 5, 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2I2tUrA7vg.
James Martin, SJ, “He’s Not Going to be Afraid to Speak his Mind,” interviewed by Stephen Colbert, The Late Show, May 14, 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRrS1l5-w7I.
Heidi Schlumpf, “Colbert the Critic,” Commonweal, May 19, 2026 https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/schlumpf-colbert-late-show-cbs-trump.
David Smith, “‘He had a unique ability to be human’: late-night TV says goodbye to Stephen Colbert,” Guardian, May 20, 2026 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/may/20/late-night-tv-says-goodbye-to-stephen-colbert.
Laura Turner, “Stephen Colbert performs liturgical dance to ‘King of Glory’,” Religion News Service, March 21, 2016 https://religionnews.com/2016/03/21/stephen-colbert-performs-liturgical-dance-to-king-of-glory/.
[Uplinked May 20, 2026]
Ordinary Time 