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Our Court Jesters Are Disappearing Just When We Need Them Most

In this authoritarian moment, we need defiant comedy more than ever.

Whatever happened to our court jesters? Stephen Colbert’s late-night show has been canceled. Jimmy Kimmel has signaled that he might just retire when his ABC contract expires in 2027. Seth Meyers—whose set at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner humiliated Donald Trump so deeply it has become part of his presidential-villain origin story—may be on borrowed time. Jimmy Fallon, who playfully tousled Donald Trump’s hair just weeks ahead of the election in 2016, was never actually interested in challenging power in the first place. In exactly the moment when we have a power apparatus that demands reverence and punishes dissent, we need defiant comedy more than ever.

During an interview on the eponymously named Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, comedian Zach Galifianakis took note of the jester’s disappearance. The conversation between Galifianakis and O’Brien had inevitably turned to Between Two Ferns, Galifianakis’s mock interview show, which cast him as a cable-access host who routinely humiliated an endless stream of rich, famous, and powerful guests. The show remains beloved because of how masterfully it skewered the inanity of celebrity interviews, late-night TV, and promotional media. The topic was timely, too, coming as it did after Trump demanded, for the second time, that ABC fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel over a joke, but before the final broadcast of Stephen Colbert’s show, whose cancellation Trump also demanded. Galifianakis used the moment to call out the comedians who hosted Trump on their podcasts ahead of the 2024 election only to fawn all over him like fanboys.

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“All the podcasters that have had the president on now—they don’t do their court jester,” Galfianakis said. “They just suck up to him. So, the comedians, [who] are podcasters, that have had Trump on, they’re not doing their job. That’s not the job of a comedian. You are to challenge. You are to make uncomfortable. You’re not to sit there and fake laugh. That is not the job of the court jester. Period.”

He didn’t name names, but he didn’t need to. He was nodding to those comedians who, as The Cut writer Jesse David so perfectly puts it, “all position themselves as outside the mainstream due to their resistance to political correctness, contrarian takes on liberal conventional wisdom, and ‘both sides are corrupt’ nihilism.” Their entire brand is about being anti-establishment, objective skeptics who bow and scrape to no one. Yet when Trump embarked on a tour of roughly a dozen of those manosphere—my descriptor, perhaps not theirs—podcasts throughout the 2024 campaign season, every host glazed him like an absolute doughnut. Those anti-woke podcast comedians who are all about saying what no one else will say seemed to lose their voices as soon as Trump entered the room.

There was Andrew Schulz, giggling but failing to make a good joke when Trump, the world’s most prolific liar, described himself as “basically a truthful person.” We had Theo “Aw-Shucks” Von calling Trump “homie” and failing to challenge JD Vance as the vice president wormed around justifications for funding genocide. Internet celebrity and podcast bro Adin Ross—who to be fair, isn’t even a comedian—deserves a mention here for pulling the ultimate simpmaxxing beta cuck move of gifting Trump a Rolex and a Cybertruck. And, of course, there is comedian Joe Rogan, who hosted Trump, the man he had called “an existential threat to democracy,” just two years earlier, for three hours. The two chatted amiably about Martian life, Trump’s great “comedic instincts,” and how he had advised Kim Jong Un to take a vacation day off from “building nuclear.”

Of course, comedians are people, and famously have political opinions. The issue........

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