Stephen Colbert slams Paramount at Writers Guild: 'The revolution was losing $40 million a year — It had to go'

Stephen Colbert used one of his last big nights in the spotlight to take a clear shot at his parent company Paramount — and the crowd loved every word of it.

Stephen Colbert hits back at his parent company - Paramount

The veteran late-night host picked up the Walter Bernstein Award at the 78th Annual Writers Guild Awards in New York on Sunday night. The prize goes to someone who has "demonstrated with creativity, grace and bravery a willingness to confront social injustice in the face of adversity."

It is named after Walter Bernstein, an American screenwriter who lost his job during Hollywood's Red Scare in the 1950s, and has only been handed out twice before.

The timing could not have been more loaded. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is due to end on 21 May after ten years — and many in the industry believe the axe did not fall for the reasons Paramount has given. The network said it was "purely a financial decision."

Not many people believed them.

In his speech, Colbert drew a careful line between himself and the award's namesake, telling the room he had never really thought about what the blacklist actually was.

"The blacklist wasn't a law or a regulation or an executive order," he said. “It was a voluntary industry-wide agreement to deny work to left-leaning artists out of fear that certain members of the government might publicly attack the parent corporation of these artists or the union that they belong to. It was that threat, only the threat, of trouble that ended so many careers. And now while to be associated with Mr. Bernstein in any way is a great honour, I want to be clear that I do not deserve the implied parallel here.”

He then went further — and the room caught exactly what he was doing.

"This is not the 1950s. This is not the Red Scare. And, as far as I can tell, no one in late-night is fomenting a revolution. As we know, the revolution will not be televised. It was going to be televised, but then Paramount bought it. Evidently, the revolution was losing, like, $40 million a year — it had to go. I hear the revolution is thinking about starting a Substack."

He never once said Donald Trump's name. He did not need to.

The show had been in trouble for months. Earlier this year, Colbert publicly accused CBS of blocking a planned guest interview from going to air. He had also called Paramount's $16 million legal settlement with Trump a "big fat bribe" — a settlement many saw as the company trying to keep the White House onside while its sale to Skydance Media worked its way through regulators.

Paramount denied any of it had anything to do with the show's cancellation.

Colbert let the audience join the dots themselves.

He then turned to his writing staff — reading out jokes that had been cut during his decade on the show and making clear he wanted them to find work after May.

"The actual 'Go' message from President Trump to launch last week's Iran attack was 'Operation Epic Fury is approved. No aborts, good luck,'" Colbert said. "Coincidentally, 'No aborts, good luck' was also the majority opinion in the Dobbs Decision."

He shared another, from the height of the #MeToo movement: "At the height of #MeToo, when it was reported that Louis CK took off all his clothes to masturbate in front of two women, one of my female writers offered me this joke: 'Oh, my God, he masturbates like a toddler poops.'"

The point of the exercise was plain. "If you liked any of these ideas, please employ these lovely folks after May 21," Colbert said. "They have so much to offer.… They are the best writing staff I have ever known at any show, and I have loved our time together, which wasn't as much time as I would like. I started in late-night as one of them. Thanks to Robert [Smigel], Dana Carvey, and Jon Stewart, and many other people, I ended up in front of the camera every night, which is a very good job with its own responsibilities, meaning you can't be in the writers room as much as you used to be."

He closed not with a joke but with something quieter — a note about what he will miss most when it is all over.

"And to some, hosting may seem like a hard job, and sometimes it is, but what's also hard is hearing the laughter from the room down the hall and not being able to go in. If you've ever been lucky enough to be in that room, you will always want to be in that sound. And what is really gonna be hard is missing these people, who despite the fresh hell — whatever it is — that the news washes in, make that beautiful sound happen every day. So to them, and all of you, and Walter Bernstein, and to our guild, thank you so much."

The Late Show signs off for the last time on 21 May.