Stephen Colbert spent years insisting he was just a comedian doing his job.
But somebody kept the receipts.
And now a bombshell study has just dropped the brutal truth about what was really happening on that CBS stage every single night.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
The Media Research Center spent years tracking every political joke Colbert told on The Late Show, and the final tally is something even his biggest fans are going to have a hard time spinning.
Since NewsBusters began counting jokes in January 2023, 87 percent of Colbert’s political jokes targeted conservatives. Not 51 percent. Not 60 percent. Eighty-seven.
Over the span of the final 458 Late Show episodes on CBS since January of 2023, NewsBusters logged 8,553 political jokes. Of these, Colbert told 7,480 — 87 percent — about conservatives, 934 about liberals, and 139 about nonpartisan people or organizations.
And it wasn’t just the jokes.
Since September 2022, more than 99 percent of Colbert’s political guests have been liberals. Over the 511 Late Show episodes NewsBusters monitored for its guest count studies since November 2022, Colbert invited the highest percentage of liberal guests compared to other hosts — a final count of 263 liberals and one conservative, or more than 99 percent.
One conservative guest in over 500 episodes. Think about that for a second.
Who Got Hit the Hardest
According to the study, Colbert made 3,639 jokes about President Donald Trump from January 3, 2023, through the eve of his final episode. Former President Joe Biden was the target of 339 jokes during that time — finishing second to Trump, who was a punchline 3,300 more times than Biden.
That gap alone tells you everything you need to know about what Colbert was actually doing up there each night.
Colbert joked about George Santos 269 times, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 208 times, Republicans in general 180 times, Vice President JD Vance 151 times, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth 146 times, Elon Musk 143 times, former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem 106 times, and Rudy Giuliani 104 times, according to the study.
Kennedy, who spent his career fighting corporate polluters and corrupt government agencies, got lumped in with the Republican pile the moment he joined the Trump administration. NewsBusters analysts started identifying RFK Jr. as a Republican in 2024 after he endorsed Trump and was selected to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. The message from Colbert’s writers’ room was pretty clear: agree with us, or you’re fair game.
Hunter Biden, who provided plenty of material from his sordid sex life, corruption, and criminal investigations for comedians willing to go there, was only joked about four times. Eric Trump, on the other hand, was the butt of 84 jokes while Colbert mocked Donald Trump Jr. 56 times.
Former President Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, managed to be the butt of a Colbert joke 24 times during the same span. Reagan has been dead for over two decades, and he still got more jokes than Hunter Biden. Let that sink in.
The disparity in how Colbert treated comparable targets from both parties is stark. Republicans drew 180 jokes versus 31 for Democrats. Fox News drew 73 jokes versus 4 for CNN. Melania Trump was mocked 100 times versus just 2 for Jill Biden. Eric Trump drew 84 jokes, and Donald Trump Jr. drew 56, versus just 4 for Hunter Biden. And among Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas drew 30 jokes and Samuel Alito 29, while Sonia Sotomayor drew zero and Ketanji Brown Jackson drew zero.
CBS Was Losing Money Hand Over Fist
None of this came free. Losing $40 million on Colbert was just fine with the Left, so long as they could attack Trump every night. CBS brass apparently decided the political points were worth the financial bleeding — right up until they weren’t.
But here’s the thing about running a nightly television show as a partisan operation: the audience notices. Ratings for late-night television have been cratering for years, and Colbert’s show was no exception. When you spend three years preaching to the same choir, eventually even the choir gets tired of hearing the same sermon.
MRC President David Bozell put it plainly: “Good riddance to Colbert’s nightly group therapy session for progressive elitists who could not understand why half the country kept rejecting their worldview.”
That’s a pretty accurate diagnosis. The whole enterprise stopped being entertainment somewhere around 2017 and turned into something closer to a nightly political rally with a desk and a bandleader.
The Colbert Defense That Doesn’t Hold Up
Stephen Colbert was well into his farewell media tour when he told GQ, “I think I’m more conservative than people think.” According to the MRC’s three years of data, that claim doesn’t survive contact with reality.
Colbert made similar arguments throughout his run — that he was just following the news, that the news just happened to be dominated by Republicans doing outrageous things, that any honest comedian would have done the same. But the numbers blow that up. When the sitting Democrat Vice President, Kamala Harris, ran for President and lost a historic election, Colbert only joked about her 21 times during that three-year period. Twenty-one. For the Democrat nominee for President of the United States.
And former GOP Representative Liz Cheney still managed to make broadly conservative points in her December 2023 appearance, so she is listed as the lone Republican in the guest study, even if most conservatives would not want to claim her. The one Republican Colbert invited was someone who campaigned for the Democrat presidential candidate. That about sums it up.
What Late Night Became — and What It Cost
There was a time when late-night television was genuinely funny to people across the political spectrum. Johnny Carson poked fun at everybody. David Letterman was weird and unpredictable. Even Jay Leno, for all his critics, tried to spread the jokes around.
Colbert’s version of The Late Show abandoned that entirely. Constant political criticism, a heavily biased guest list, and a lack of creative variety shaped late-night television ratings and network losses more than the humor itself. You can only watch someone make the same Trump joke 3,640 times before you change the channel for good.
And the audience did exactly that.
The irony is that Colbert and his writers probably convinced themselves they were doing something brave and important. But brave journalism and brave comedy punch at power — all power, not just the power held by the party you didn’t vote for. What the MRC study documents isn’t bravery. It’s a very expensive, very one-sided political operation that CBS finally decided it couldn’t keep subsidizing.
The show is over. The numbers are in. And the next time someone in Hollywood tells you the media doesn’t have a liberal bias, you can point them to 8,553 jokes and ask them to explain the math.
Sources: Fox News Digital, May 22, 2026; NewsBusters/Media Research Center, May 22, 2026; NewsBusters/Media Research Center, December 22, 2025; The Gateway Pundit, May 22, 2026.