When Politics Isn’t Funny

Late-night show hosts have always found plenty of fodder for comedy in politics. For years, Johnny Carson — and then his successor on “The Tonight Show,” Jay Leno — made it a point to skewer politicians in his monologue.

But Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel have been changing the last-night landscape, turning comedy into wacky skits, games and musical numbers, leaving the political humor to others. And for some of those other hosts, it’s not working out so well.

Larry Wilmore, host of Comedy Central’s “The Nightly Show,” has lost half his viewers since taking over for Stephen Colbert. “The Colbert Report” averaged 1.3 million total viewers in February 2014, according to Nielsen. Wilmore averaged 580,000 total viewers each night in the first week of February 2015, meaning his audience is 55 percent lower from the Colbert days.

It doesn’t bode well for this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on April 30, where Wilmore will be headlining.

What’s to blame? Is it all about politics?

In a recent Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session with Wilmore, most readers seemed to be disappointed by “vapid pop culture commentary or race relations in America for his punch lines and segment focuses,” according to Adweek.

Joe Concha, writing on Mediate.com, says Wilmore is failing because he’s a “hopeless ideologue” — and “humorless one,” at that. Concha says Wilmore’s “obsession” with race ends up with him delivering more F-bomb-riddled commentaries than monologues with good punch lines.

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Some of Wilmore’s recent attempts at humor: On Monday’s panel segment, Wilmore and the gang discussed whether Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are truly Hispanic. And there was that supposed-to-be funny remark about wanting to kill Donald Trump. Wilmore said, “Sorry everyone. I don’t want to give him any more oxygen. That’s not a euphemism, by the way. I mean it literally. Somebody get me the pillow they used to kill [Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia and I’ll do it — I’ll do it! I could get in trouble for that, actually!”

Wilmore’s not the only one struggling. Trevor Noah, who took over for Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” — and who recently compared Donald Trump to an African dictator —  has lost viewers, too. A year ago, the “Daily Show” was drawing 1.2 million viewers. In the first week of February, Nielsen showed Noah’s audience down by more than 30 percent, averaging 812,000 each night. Salon.com wrote this week that Noah has made the show “irrelevant.”

Even Colbert isn’t getting the ratings or the traction on social media that other late-night hosts have. Colbert’s Facebook page and YouTube channel followers are a fraction of what Fallon and Kimmel draw. Attempting to discredit Cruz or Trump or Rubio just doesn’t pull in viewers like a good “ew!” skit, especially when it’s done with Jennifer Lopez.

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Staying away from political humor, especially this election season, seems to pay off.

Colbert far surpasses Fallon and Kimmel in booking political guests — 11 percent compared to 3 percent for Fallon and 2 percent for Kimmel, reports fivethirtyeight.com. And lately, Fallon’s lead in the ratings has only grown larger, roughly doubling Colbert’s numbers despite the spike “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” saw in by landing the high-profile post-Super Bowl episode.

But the bottom line is, viewers aren’t tuning in to liberal comics bashing conservatives. And the numbers just keep falling.