{"id":158845,"date":"2025-09-21T13:03:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T13:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/158845\/"},"modified":"2025-09-21T13:03:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T13:03:10","slug":"trumps-war-with-us-comedy-shows-wont-stop-with-jimmy-kimmel-or-stephen-colbert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/158845\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s war with US comedy shows won\u2019t stop with Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert"},"content":{"rendered":"

Comedy is how many people process the harshness of reality. Jokes can cut through the nonsense. Look how people wait with bated breath<\/a> for the next South Park episode to get some catharsis from the chaos of war, famine, genocide and authoritarianism. You can deny a fact, but you can\u2019t deny a laugh. And that\u2019s why Trump allies are going after comedians.<\/p>\n

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If I were writing for one of those shows right now, I\u2019d be at a stalemate: the most important jokes to write are the ones about Trump\u2019s censorship, and yet the networks will be nervous about airing them. And it\u2019s not as simple as just finding a different network. Where will Kimmel and Colbert go now? As media companies continue to merge, they become way more centralised and controlled by a select few. If the heads of these companies are willing to kowtow to the administration, they\u2019re on the verge of becoming a state media.<\/p>\n

Even if late night hosts move their shows online, they can\u2019t escape the monopolies and companies trying to appease Trump. Online there is a four-way monopoly: Apple, Google, Meta and Amazon: all have chief executives who donated to Trump\u2019s inauguration and are flattering him in press conferences, no doubt in the hopes they\u2019ll secure grants to develop AI. It wouldn\u2019t take much to suppress Kimmel or Colbert on any of their platforms.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always about money. The networks don\u2019t mind if they\u2019re free enterprise or ruthless capitalists or oligarchs. They just want their product to give them power, status and wealth. But the idea that government bodies might punish the production for a quip about them isn\u2019t just an attempt to stop us from talking about them \u2013 it\u2019s an effort to change how we think about them.<\/p>\n

At our worst, comedians are just silly writers of puns. At our best, we hold up a mirror to society. But right now, the US government doesn\u2019t want anyone looking in that mirror out of fear they might see what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

Simon Taylor is a Melbourne-based comedian.<\/p>\n

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Comedy is how many people process the harshness of reality. Jokes can cut through the nonsense. Look how…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":158846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,427],"class_list":{"0":"post-158845","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}