The indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show reveals what Elon Musk’s pledge to “legalize comedy” actually meant: making it legal for the right comedians. While Shane Gillis sells out Madison Square Garden and Sam Hyde gains millions of YouTube views, late-night television is moving in the opposite direction. Stephen Colbert was given the boot in May, and Kimmel went off the air after suggesting that Charlie Kirk’s killer was “one of them” — referring to MAGA — and mocking Donald Trump’s reaction to the shooting last week.

Some version of Musk’s motto has been the Right’s rallying cry ever since Gillis was dropped from SNL in 2019 over old podcast clips mocking Asian accents. It surfaced again when Hyde lost his Adult Swim sketch show after BuzzFeed “uncovered” supposed alt-Right ties during Trump’s first term. At the time, conservatives would claim (rightly) that they were being silenced for edgy jokes. Well, mission accomplished — just not in the way anyone expected.

The Right didn’t restore free speech in comedy: it only changed who gets to speak freely. What’s fascinating is how transparent the mechanism is. During a recent appearance on Benny Johnson’s podcast, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr claimed Kimmel was “appearing to directly mislead the American public”, saying that his comments were “not a joke” or “making fun”. Then, regarding FCC intervention, Carr said: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” indicating that broadcasters were “running the possibility of license revocation from the FCC” if they kept airing Kimmel.

After Nexstar, which operates 32 ABC stations, said it was pulling the show, Carr thanked the media conglomerate “for doing the right thing” — this, while Nexstar happened to have a $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna pending FCC approval. Similarly, Paramount settled a Trump lawsuit and canceled Colbert around the time it needed government approval for its Skydance merger.

Comedy has now been fully absorbed into the same partisan wars which shape free-speech debates. The old late-night middlebrow style — Johnny Carson’s studied neutrality, David Letterman’s ironic detachment before his late-career lurch into turbo-liberalism — has been dead for decades. Since George W. Bush’s Iraq War inanities fueled the rise of The Daily Show under Jon Stewart, the airwaves have been an almost exclusive bastion of liberal comedy.

That has now changed. Today’s thriving conservative comedians include Greg Gutfeld, who opened the door for Right-wing comedy years ago and whose Fox show dominates the 10pm late-night slot with 3.29 million total viewers in the last quarter and 238,000 in the key 18-49-year-old demographic. Meanwhile, liberal comedy continues hemorrhaging viewers: even the supposedly “apolitical” Jimmy Fallon dropped from 1.54 million viewers in that demographic in 2014 to just 157,000 today. Kimmel and Colbert followed a similar trend.

Some might say the irony is delicious. The same people who decried Gillis’s SNL firing as cancel culture are now orchestrating their own government-backed cancellations. But the truth is that making comedy legal again was never about principles. The only difference now is that conservatives have the state and audience power to implement their preferences.

Where does comedy go from here? With the exception of Fox’s Gutfeld, it seems like the traditional late-night format is dead — killed by streaming, podcasts, and YouTube long before politics delivered the final blow. The future of cutting-edge comedy likely belongs to those comedians capable of building their own platforms independent of legacy broadcast gatekeepers, where they can secure the backing of both fans and rising politicians and cultural influencers willing to support their work.

Gillis and Hyde proved that resilience pays off. They were canceled, rebuilt their audiences online, and came back stronger, showing that cultural influence isn’t owned by any ideology. For liberal comedians, the lesson is clear: the rules have changed. Social media outrage and boycotts aren’t power — real influence now comes from who gets to define truth, comedy, and public discourse.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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