Greg Gutfeld beat Stephen Colbert by more than a million viewers a night — on cable, in far fewer homes.
Now Colbert has taped his last show and the man who buried him is still on the air.
CBS just handed Colbert's time slot to someone who had to write them a check to take it.
Gutfeld Said CBS Was Free to Cancel a Late Show That Was Losing 40 Million a Year
When liberals screamed that Stephen Colbert was being silenced, Greg Gutfeld didn't flinch.
He said CBS is "free to fire someone who's stinking up a market like they took a dump in the produce section."
That wasn't just a punchline – it was the verdict.
Colbert's Late Show was losing $40 million a year.
CBS will save an estimated $150 million annually the moment comedian Byron Allen takes over the slot tomorrow night.
Allen isn't being paid by CBS to host. Allen is paying CBS to air his show Comics Unleashed.
That's what eleven years of nightly Democrat campaign ads bought Colbert – a time slot so damaged the only taker was a guy running a time-buy deal, the same arrangement you see from infomercials at 2 a.m.
Gutfeld also torched the idea that Colbert was some kind of brave truth-teller on his way out the door.
He said the fact that Colbert is leaving as some sort of risk-taking comic is the biggest joke he ever told.
Colbert spent eleven years picking the same approved targets and protecting the same approved politicians.
Carson made fun of everybody.
Letterman handed Colbert the keys in 2015 with around 3 million viewers a night.
Colbert exits at 1.3 million.
Gutfeld Ratings vs Late Show Ratings and It Was Never Close
When CBS pulled the plug last July, Trump posted on Truth Social within hours.
"Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined," Trump wrote.
The ratings had already proven it.
Gutfeld! averaged 3.49 million viewers in March – nearly double what Colbert managed in his final months, on a cable channel that reaches a fraction of the homes CBS does.
Gutfeld explained why his show works in an interview last month: "People find my show entertaining because I'm saying things that they're thinking that they thought they couldn't say. Everybody else has made it so suffocating."
Colbert made it suffocating on purpose.
He looked at 70 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump and decided those people were the enemy, not the audience.
Gutfeld looked at those same 70 million Americans and gave them a show.
One of those decisions built the most watched late night program in America.
The other one is off the air.
Jon Stewart Blamed Paramount While Gutfeld Built the Biggest Late Night Audience in America
This week Colbert's famous friends showed up to say goodbye.
Jon Stewart blamed Paramount for capitulating to Trump.
David Letterman called CBS executives "lying weasels."
Neither of them asked the more honest question: why was a show hemorrhaging $40 million a year and drawing 1.3 million viewers kept on the air in the first place?
CBS protected Colbert's show because it served a political purpose – and the moment the network needed actual revenue instead of cultural validation, the math was over in ten seconds.
Jon Stewart had his own show canceled by Paramount in the 1990s and learned nothing from it.
Letterman handed off a 3 million viewer franchise and watched Colbert run it into the ground defending politicians who couldn't win a national election.
Neither of them will say what Gutfeld said on his show – the one that's still on the air, still growing, and just proved that half the country was never the problem.
They were the audience nobody wanted to serve.
Gutfeld served them. And he won.
Sources:
- "CBS to Replace Colbert's Late Show with Byron Allen's Comics Unleashed," Fox News, April 6, 2026.
- "Colbert's Demise, by the Numbers," Washington Examiner, May 20, 2026.
- "Fox News' Greg Gutfeld Gives His Verdict on Rival Late Night Shows," TV Insider, July 29, 2025.
- "Byron Allen Says He'll Save CBS at Least $150 Million," The Wrap, May 16, 2026.
- "Gutfeld Continues to Dominate Late Night Viewership," That Park Place, March 25, 2026.
- Gabriel Hays, "Colbert Tells Trump to Go F Himself After President Taunts Him Over Show Cancellation," Fox News, July 22, 2025.