Vince Vaughn Just Gave Colbert His Obituary and He Nailed It
Stephen Colbert's show is dying in May.
And now Vince Vaughn – Wedding Crashers, Swingers, one of the last honest men in Hollywood – just explained exactly why.
Vince Vaughn told Theo Von what viewers have been saying for years – and the people who killed late night will never admit he's right.
When Late Night Stopped Being Funny
Johnny Carson never needed to be your political compass.
Neither did Jay Leno. Or Letterman. They could skewer a senator, mock the culture, land a punchline that cut both ways – and the audience went to bed laughing, not lectured. That was the job. Entertain first. Everything else was secondary.
Kimmel used to be that guy. The Man Show. Win Ben Stein's Money. A comedian who made you laugh whether you voted Republican or Democrat. Then Trump won in 2016, and something snapped. The jokes gave way to crying monologues. The guests shifted from movie stars to Democratic senators. By 2024, Kimmel was on stage moderating a $30 million Biden-Obama fundraiser in Los Angeles while Colbert was doing the same in New York – a president whose obvious cognitive decline they spent years refusing to acknowledge.
Vaughn appeared on Theo Von's This Past Weekend this week and nailed the diagnosis in a single sentence.
"I think that the talk shows, to a large part, became really agenda-based," Vaughn said. "They were gonna evangelize people what they thought."
He kept going: "It stopped being funny, and it started feeling like I was in a f***ing class I didn't want to take."
Eleven years of late night collapse, one line.
The Numbers Don't Lie
Colbert's Late Show – the supposed ratings king of the 11:35 PM slot – was costing CBS roughly $40 million a year when the network finally pulled the plug last July. The show ends May 21st.
CBS leaving late night entirely for the first time since David Letterman launched The Late Show in 1993.
The key demographic – adults 18 to 49 – collapsed across the board. Colbert's demo viewership fell 19 percent year-over-year through 2025. The Tonight Show was down 17 percent. Seth Meyers shed 19 percent in the demo. Overall late-night viewership among that coveted group dropped 17 percent in a single year.
Meanwhile, Gutfeld! – the only late night show that acts like entertainment instead of a faculty meeting – averaged 3.1 million viewers in 2025, up 21 percent from the year before. A cable show, beating the broadcast networks.
"They all became the same show," Vaughn said.
The podcasts tell the same story. Over half the country now listens monthly. The news podcast audience flipped its political composition in a single year – from majority Democrat to majority Republican – because people who wanted real conversation stopped waiting for late night to provide it.
Hollywood Knows, But Won't Say It
Vaughn is a rare breed in that town – a genuine conservative who hasn't been blacklisted yet, possibly because he's too established and too profitable to cancel. He put his hand over his heart at a White House ceremony in 2019 and the industry spent a week trying to ruin him for it.
He understands the math Colbert never did.
When your only remaining viewers are people who already agree with every word you say, you haven't built an audience – you've built an echo chamber with a laugh track. You can't grow that. You can only watch it shrink.
Carson entertained a country that argued about everything and agreed on nothing. He made both sides feel in on the joke. That's a skill. It requires discipline. It requires a host who genuinely believes the job is to make people laugh, not move them politically.
Kimmel, Colbert, and Meyers decided the lectures were more important than the laughs. They thought they could hold the audience with partisan energy alone.
The numbers told a different story every single quarter – and they ignored every one.
Vaughn finished the thought: "But if you look at what happened to the talk shows and why their ratings are low, it's got only to do with the fact of what you just said, which is they all became the same show. And they all become so about their politics and who's good and who is bad. And it's like, imagine sitting next to someone like that on a f***ing plane. Bro, you'd be like, how do I get out of this f***ing seat?"
Colbert's final broadcast is set for May 21st. He'll probably call it a political assassination. The real cause of death is simpler – and Vince Vaughn just delivered the eulogy.
Sources:
- Alejandro Avila, "Vince Vaughn Says Late Night Lost Viewers When It Became 'Agenda-Based'," OutKick, March 24, 2026.
- Mike LaChance, "Actor Vince Vaughn Rips Stephen Colbert and Other Late Night Hosts: 'They All Became the Same Show'," Gateway Pundit, March 24, 2026.
- Christian Toto, "2025: The Year Late-Night TV Collapsed," Hollywood in Toto, December 1, 2025.
- "2025 Ratings: Late-Night TV's Biggest Winners and Losers," LateNighter, January 13, 2026.
- Joseph Wulfsohn, "CBS Cancels 'The Late Show,' Stephen Colbert to End Program in May 2026," Fox News, July 18, 2025.
- "Fox News Scores Record Ratings in 2025," Mediaite, December 15, 2025.
- "From Late Night to Anytime: How Podcasts Are Replacing Talk Shows," SiriusXM Media, 2025.
