How Bad Is It?: Trump’s War on Comedians

0:06Hi, Andrew. Hey, Tyler. Good to be here. Thanks for being here. And welcome back to the fourth episode of our special series, How Bad Is It?, where you and I conduct a monthly checkup on the health of our democracy. Yeah. I don't know if these checkups have been getting better or worse. It's hard to tell. I sort of find it all so confusing. I mean, this one, though, this, I guess, is like our is comedy under threat episode. Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the rare times where there is a media story that matters as much to us members of the press as it does to the rest of America and just people who care about television and watch it.

0:43The big news this week has been, you know, first you have the defunding of NPR and PBS. And then the most high profile story has been this Paramount Skydance merger and the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Paramount and CBS said that it was a financial decision. But there also seem to be all of these other factors that are not very financial. And then at the same time, you also have this episode of South Park that just came out. South Park, you know, being owned by Paramount, which is just totally skewering Trump. Well, give us give us the whole backstory on that. You wrote a whole piece about this South Park episode and South Park in general.

1:21So walk us through that one. Yeah. So the creators of South Park recently signed a$1.5 billion deal with Paramount, which basically bought the exclusive streaming rights to the show and also another 50 episodes. And the first episode comes out, and I believe it came out on Wednesday of last week. And it went hard even for South Park. I mean, Trump is depicted in all sorts of ways. You get him in animated form in bed with the devil. Yeah, literally in bed with Satan, who is, you know, an occasional character in the show. You have him talking about, you know, demurring when asked about the Epstein files.

2:02You have him doing the YMCA dance. I thought he was literally going to have sex with Satan the way that they had the sex scene in Team America. So, you know, they are being restrained. Yeah, there was one place where they held back. But like the, you know, sort of the the big part of the episode that's been kind of going viral is the ending, which is an AI generated deep fake of Trump naked walking through a desert and speaking to his own penis, which is depicted to be very, very, very, very small. And so this is, you know, Stephen Colbert maybe gets fired for pissing off Trump. And then you have the same company that's responsible for that decision airing this episode of South Park, which is way more offensive in, yeah, just like in every possible way.

2:49And then this merger, this Paramount Skydance merger still goes through. So it's a little bit confusing, right? It's like, is South Park too big to fail? Like, are they just more valuable than Colbert? Or is South Park and like the fact that it's a cartoon somehow – does that somehow make it less offensive to Trump than Stephen Colbert in a suit kind of going at him in a way that might feel a bit more like morally righteous? Of all the things that Trump like talks about or truths about or tweets about or whatever, this seems like an area where he actually can leverage a lot of influence either formally or informally.

3:26Like informally, just by sort of mounting these pressure campaigns and, you know, campaigning against cancel culture and then literally trying to cancel people he doesn't like. But then also formally by running an FCC where he has this really staunch loyalist, Brendan Carr, going out and saying things that disparage the president are biased and we're going to take care of it. So the question is, like, is that working? Yeah, I mean, the exact quote from the FCC chair, Brendan Carr, is the media industry across this country needs a course correction, which doesn't sound very good. Yeah, to try to tease apart all that stuff, how much of this is about politics, how much of this is just the way comedy has always been.

4:11We wanted to talk to someone who actually does this stuff. So we decided to talk to Roy Wood Jr., who hosts the satire news show Have I Got News For You on CNN, who used to be on The Daily Show and is also a stand-up comedian, to just try to feel out, like, how much is this just the way the entertainment business has always worked? And how much is this actually a chilling effect under Trump? And, like, what does it actually feel like to feel out where these lines are in practice? This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. I'm Andrew Marantz. I'm a staff writer.

4:50Thanks, Roy. Thanks for coming on. Oh, pleasure. Pleasure. So basically, you are hosting a show on CNN that I think is coming back in September. And that show is obviously, you know, commenting on what's going on in politics, what's going on in the news. as you are looking at what's happening now in the news and in the way that comedians and political commentators can respond to the news, how does that give you ideas about what you do or don't want to do when you come back on your show in September? Like we're seeing some comedians like Colbert getting fired possibly for what they say. We're getting other people like South Park getting lauded for what they're saying.

5:36How much of this is informing what you're thinking about what you want to do in September? You know, I don't think anything changes with Have I Got News for You. I mean, because the news cycles move so fast, you know, one of our panelists, you know, we have Michael Ian Black on my left every week. And then to my right is Amber Ruffin, who came on our show the week after the Correspondents Association rescinded the invitation for her to host a correspondence dinner. And Amber said that both sides are not the same. So I don't think that there's some sort of tepidness from us as a program to act like there isn't calamity in the world and to make jokes about it in an effort to inform people about it.

6:18If the question is, because of what's happening with Colbert and whatever's going to happen on the backside of South Park or some potential lawsuit or the White House being mad, are we as a show going to bend the knee to that? I don't plan on it as a host. You know, my role is a little different on this show than it was on a daily show as a correspondent. But if it's wild and weird and it happened that week, we are going to talk about it and we're going to talk about the people responsible. And that's what we've always done. And if there was ever a meeting from the staff or CNN, hey guys, tone it down a little bit.

6:56I don't know if Amber Ruffin and Michael and black of the two people you want to give that director to because they're gonna do the opposite you know like amber amber told you she was gonna hey can you do jokes about both sides no well we're gonna fire you then fire me that's basically what happened with that so this conversation and this desire to try and inch late night to a place of you know some sort of both-sidedness I don't know if that's necessarily you know the right way to go you know and to say that every show was wasn't doing that I think is an inaccuracy as well I mean people forget Jon Stewart his first day back he called Joe Biden old that was his first episode back as host of The Daily Show, post Trevor Noah.

7:52So I don't think we can sit here and act like every show has always been, oh, Biden, you're so good, but Trump, him bad. I don't think that's always been the case. Hell, at the Correspondents Dinner, I did a Biden old joke. First joke was about him leaving classified documents all over the ball ring. So I just don't think that we necessarily live in that world as much as the White House and its administration wants us to believe. I just think it's a very, very brilliant traction tactic led by the administration against the voices of late night. I'm glad that you brought that up because I think it's true that while comedy in some ways has gotten more partisan, I would say, under Trump and especially in the the second Trump era, there still is this long history of comedians going after both sides.

8:44And, you know, Colbert did that a lot as well, even though people aren't talking about that as much right now. So going back to the cancellation of The Late Show, you know, this has been framed by Paramount and CBS as a budgetary decision. But a lot of people are obviously pretty skeptical about this given the timing of the announcement. Now, just a little background for our listeners. Paramount was in the process of merging with Skydance Media, and this was a deal that was held up by Trump's FCC until Paramount settled a lawsuit that Trump had filed against CBS, which is a subsidiary of Paramount.

9:14So then Colbert goes on his show and calls the settlement a big fat bribe. And three days later, his show is canceled and Trump is celebrating this. And again, we're told it was a financial decision. You know, Andrew and I are curious, given your experience with late night television, what is the likelihood of this purely being a financial decision? Like what is kind of the status of late night comedy right now and how is it doing? I guess. I mean, that's you're kind of asking two kind of broader questions, but to keep it Colbert to start the Colbert decision being purely financial. No, you could say finances were part of it, but it's like, no, it's, it's purely financial in the way of somebody you were probably going to break up with, but you know, you could have probably gone to therapy a little bit first, but they did something that was good enough and I can break up with you now and justify it and get away clean.

10:14If it's purely financial, you figure out ways to cut costs, save money. You make concessions. Even if you do something as bold as cutting, you know, half the workforce at Colbert, if the budget losses are because of the ballooning staff, well, any other company would cut staff. Every other late night show cuts staff. They've been asked to cut staff, cut nights of production, get rid of bands. There are tiers of problem solving because this is still a number one show. Are ratings down? Yes. Less people watch TV. I think that's a better way to frame the ratings are down conversation. So yeah, to the bigger, broader question, late night as a formula, as a profitable way to reach audiences, I don't know if it still makes sense under the current construct.

11:03But why would you not explore the new construct with the existing talent that everybody already knows and loves? If it's one thing television hates, it's a new face or a new idea. We would rather reboot, remake, take the face you love and put them back in something different and remix it. It's the latest show with Stephen Cook. It's the Colbert Hour. like it's the same thing netflix did with letterman what if we just got rid of paul shaffer and an audience and just put letterman on stage with a person let's try that so there were a million other tiers of experimentation that could have happened if it was purely financial and so you know no i i agree with a lot of my other colleagues in late night that But, you know, there was a lot of politics involved in this decision as well.

11:56And I don't think also to the CBS side of it, when Taylor Tomlinson declined to come back for a third season, rather than find a new host, they just canceled after midnight. And it don't get much cheaper than three comedians making jokes about TikToks. That's as cheap of a show as you can get. But what I also don't believe, and I could be wrong because I don't know a lot about TV. I'm no George Cheeks. But I also don't think that the networks are going to give that time slot back to the local affiliates. We're not going to be bombarded with Chuck Norris exercise machines and Laronco deep fryer commercials at 1230 anymore.

12:39But I just don't think anyone has an idea. and they're all too scared to experiment with anything, especially CBS, because they're going into a merger. And I think that what will eventually happen, and again, I could be wrong, but what I think will happen with late night is something similar to sports, where you will see the acquisition of IP that is already pre-established and then it is deployed throughout the network. The same as what ESPN has done with Pat McAfee in acquiring his program, which he built himself from the ground up. The same with David Portnoy and Barstool and their relationship now with Fox Sports.

13:15So I just think that that's probably where things end up. But the irony of it all is that most of these original new concepts will probably be ideated by the same people that you're going to alienate and downsize and try to force out over the next couple of years. I actually wanted to ask you about, I mean, first of all, you know, maybe this makes me a biased journalist, but I was sort of a, I hope Roy Wood is the next host of The Daily Show back then. So I'm just going to cop to my bias here. But I understood why you left when you did, and I've heard you talk about it. And the fact that even then was having to do with this potential merger with Paramount is interesting.

13:55And I think it suggests a couple of things. One is just that these things can drag on and have unpredictable effects in all kinds of ways. Another thing, though, that I would like you to talk about more is just like whether it's always just been that there's these arbitrary business decisions and rich people making shady deals that they're not really being fully clear about. or if some of this is different under Trump, right? Because we know that Donald Trump is a particular kind of person with a particular thin skin who particularly doesn't like being made fun of and is willing to use formal and informal power that previous politicians have not.

14:33So going back to your experience doing this over the years and your experience on The Daily Show and when you decided to leave and what you've done since, does it feel really different now under this administration or is this just what it's always been? I think that we're in a different time now in terms of the pressures of an administration and a misinformed public pushing back on people who are just supposed to just be cracking jokes. And you use that to decide what your own truth is. You know, I left The Daily Show because there was a degree of, in my opinion, uncertainty within the company as a whole and not knowing where I would fit on the other side of a merger.

15:12And if I'm not host, whether I fit into the new offense, quote unquote, that whatever new quarterback they hired brought in. So I figured if there's ever a time to leave, it's now. My decision was more about the state of that show and that company. Whereas now I feel like there's a larger conversation about the state of late night as a vehicle for criticism. And, you know, it's really not that different when you look at how the president chooses the podcast. that he wants to go on. He could go on Andrew Schultz. He could go on Theo Vaughn. He can go on places where he feels like he's going to get a little bit of a degree of friendly fire for the most part.

15:54So there's always going to be places. And to the converse of that, you have a pod save America or you have a love it and leave it. There are going to be places where whatever point of view somebody wants to expouse, there's going to be a pulpit for it. So getting rid of late night or attacking comedians isn't going to stop that. And I wish the administration would realize that you're just playing a game of stupid whack-a-mole, you know, for no reason whatsoever. I don't know how much we're, you know, considering I work at CNN, he already don't like us. So it's not like it can get much worse. They kick CNN out of the room and I don't know, gave BuzzFeed their seats.

16:36No disrespect to BuzzFeed. It wasn't BuzzFeed, but you get what I'm saying. They picked like random right wing outlets and gave them better offices in the press. So there's always going to be these pity, these ticky tack battles that the administration fights. Yeah, we've talked a bit on this podcast about the financial precarity of newspapers and magazines right now and how that has enabled Trump to go after them just because you have like a, you know, Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post. But like the actual thing that he cares about taking care of is Amazon. And so if Trump is able to threaten Amazon, then all of a sudden you see changes happening at the Post.

17:18And it sounds like you're saying that there's something maybe kind of similar happening in late night comedy in the sense that because it's not thriving in the way that it used to be, maybe just because people aren't watching television as much. It is also in a financially precarious enough situation that you can see these kinds of deals and cancellations happen. Yeah, but I don't think that's going to stop the comedians from doing what Trump hopes this would do, which is silence them. Don Lemon got fired from CNN and now has a YouTube channel with almost well over, last I checked, half a million subscribers.

17:56Don Lemon is still out in the streets with a microphone talking and throwing grenades, as he should be. And so you're only going to get more of that if you just stop them from being on television. I think the big difference between late night and news, though, is that local reporters don't necessarily have that same level of ability to reach the masses. They can't pivot on a dime. You can get a sub stack and you can get an email list and subscribers and stuff like that. But I think where you have companies that have basically phased out the idea of local reporters, there are local papers in top 10 populated markets with a single local reporter.

18:42How are you supposed to follow what's happening with ICE with a single reporter? How are you supposed to follow what's happening with crime and local and state political corruption? Oh, do you cover ICE today or do you cover the flash flood that killed all the people because of the policy you didn't approve and the politicians? Which thing do you deploy your single reporter on? And that single reporter doesn't necessarily have the time, the resources or the energy to go and follow every other thing that they need to follow to keep us a well-informed democracy. So which atrocity are you going to send the reporter on?

19:22Now, I can sit there and do whatever I need, you know, as a jokester from a desk, but I cannot do the broader coverage of journalism. So I think what's happening with Bezos and cutting a lot of that staff, that to me is far more heinous of an issue.

19:45More with Roy Wood Jr. after the break. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

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20:46You know, one thing that Andrew and I have been wondering about, and I'm curious whether you have have thoughts on it. I mean, not long after, you know, there was this announcement that Colbert's show was being canceled, there was this South Park episode, you know, and South Park is also newly owned by Paramount. Paramount and the creators of South Park struck a$1.5 billion deal. And so this episode of South Park comes out. It's the first episode of the 27th season. And it absolutely skewers Trump. I mean, not just making fun of him and mentioning the Epstein files, but also like, you know, using this AI generated deep fake, essentially showing Trump naked with, and I'm sorry to even say this.

21:25A small genitals, yeah. Yeah, you know, a micro penis, as one might put it. He's a crybaby man boy who has a small penis who's always overly sensitive about stuff. So why does that fly? I mean, maybe first, I would love to hear more from you about whether you thought the episode was funny. You know, like if it was actually good comedy or if you think it was more just cathartic to people and kind of like a resistance era way. And then we can talk about, you know, sort of the fallout from it. I think that it was funny. And this is also coming from a person who laughed at the South Park episode where they had Randy Marsh say the N-word.

22:03Yeah. That was an all-timer, I can say. That show has constantly touched the third rail. This was not uncharacteristic of South Park in terms of, if you look at the arc over 27 seasons, this isn't a departure. This isn't a very special episode where we're going to finally take a stand. Like it's, and this analogy isn't one-to-one, but in terms of cultural pivot from what you normally expect, this isn't Kate McKinnon as Hillary on the piano the week after the election. Like that tonal cold open for SNL. You get what I'm saying? And like, I thought it was funny. I definitely think they went a little harder than they normally do.

22:46But I think that was also to deliberately put their parent company in a rock and a hard place. You owe me a lot of money, but you're also kissing his ass. Well, I'm going to put out an episode that's going to infuriate him with you. So if you try and come and try to Colbert me, it's going to cost you way more than what it cost you to do what you did to Colbert. So I don't know if Trey Parker and Matt Stone are two people you want to be ticking off right now. You know, if you're Paramount Skydance or whoever the hell is coming in, I think you leave them alone and let that one slide. And I think for Trump, it's better off that you just shh, because they're not nice like Colbert.

23:29Colbert told you to F off. Trey Parker at Batstone made a CGI AI generated image of you walking naked in the desert with your penis talking. You better leave them boys alone. Them potheads from Denver. I don't know if they're potheads, but they smoke every night. You got to smoke to make a talking turd called Mr. Hankey. So you've smoked something at some point in your life. So I think that you have to just let that one slide. And I think animation, that's a little different from late night in a way, because it's understood to be crazy town, whereas late night is seen as the truth. I just, you know, late night is not going to become a cavalcade of docile hosts.

24:22It can't be a bunch of just easy docile stuff because that's going to get you YouTube numbers. And that's not profitable either. Well, let's talk about that exact thing about the docile versus having teeth. This is a thing that has constantly come up with comedy. I mean, comedy is to some extent having teeth. That's part of the job description. I mean, I saw you refer to your influences as George Carlin and Master P, right? Like that's, you know, watch George Carlin special and then go listen to Master P. That's a pretty good mix right there. Master P was a hustler. He was self-made. Of course, of course.

24:58And so if you have, but that George Carlin thing, that's built on, and Master P also, it's built on being like too dangerous for late night, too unpredictable for network, that kind of thing. And when you go around the country doing clubs, I'm sure you can do things that there's no way you can do on a network show or on CNN for that matter. So like, how do you bring those that teeth or that truth to power ethos and infuse it into TV without being South Park on CNN? Like, how do you walk that line? I don't know if you can anymore. I think that we live in a world where people are so entrenched in their own viewpoint that they are not willing to allow you to even make a joke about something they don't agree with.

25:49Mike Birbiglia said it best, comedy only works when we all agree on the premise. Most of the time now, we don't agree on the premise. And, you know, I don't know how you, the question you're asking is rooted in, how do I get people to accept the joke with which the premise they don't agree? And that's your problem. That's not on me. I remember in prep for my correspondence dinner, watching other people's correspondence dinners. And the broader note I figured out is that you can't copy or really learn anything because every presidential year, the tone, the political climate is different. So there's no way to like really learn anything, but you still see jokes.

26:36I'm like, oh, wow, that was a good joke. There's no way you could do that joke now. Like what? No one would allow that. I remember Cedric the Entertainer, He did a George Bush era correspondence dinner. And there was a Condoleezza Rice joke. It was nothing disparaging, but Condoleezza was in the room. If I did anything like that under the Trump administration, that would just be seen as patting them on the head. It would be the liberal version of Jimmy Fallon touching Donald Trump's hair. if I if I'm in the room and I go oh Caitlyn Jenner's here or oh so-and-so Bayer from Fox News is here oh here's a friendly joke that's chummy and meets in the middle of the aisle liberals would have a field day with me the next day and go they how could you when you know that he did the interview and he spews the blah, blah, blah.