Jim and Jeff ran through some of the reasons why The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will have its final season next year. Both rightly attribute its demise to its being taken over by unfunny, left-affirming “clapter.” But no amount of Skibidi Biden (I am sorry for inflicting this on you, but it was already inflicted on me) or dancing Covid vaccines could save the show in the end.

Covid was responsible for one of the best demonstrations of how Colbert’s brand of humor had ceased to amuse, if it ever really did. In an interesting twist, Jon Stewart helped in the demonstration. Stewart’s Daily Show essentially created Colbert’s career. There, he debuted his parody of a right-winger that eventually got him his own spin-off TV show, and then his Late Show gig. In those days, on the rare occasions I watched either, I found Colbert’s parody more amusing than Stewart’s performative exasperation and tendency to make serious points and then retreat into the comedy castle when seriously rebutted.

But either something changed in recent years, or Stewart always had an iconoclastic temperament I (slightly) underrated that could sometimes land. Land it did in June 2021. Stewart, back on his old friend’s show, began to suggest he thought it might be possible that Covid-19 had leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. Colbert, sensing a deviation from the left’s bizarre intolerance of this theory, followed up. “Do you mean perhaps there’s a chance that this was created in a lab? If there’s evidence I’d love to hear it, I just don’t know.” In response, Stewart proceeded to be, well . . . funny (video here):

“A chance?” Stewart said. “Oh my god, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China, what do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird!”

Stewart then joked that when scientists were asked about the theory, the response was “maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili and now we all have coronavirus?”

“What about this,” Stewart went on. “There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania, what do you think happened? I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel made it with a cocoa bean. Or it’s the f***ing chocolate factory!”

Having been in the proximity of a successful joke, Colbert did his best to smother it. “How long have you worked for Senator Ron Johnson?,” he retorted. Because only a bad/mean/crazy/whatever Republican could consider the possibility that a bat coronavirus emerged in the city with facilities that were studying bat coronaviruses. (Sorry, Jim.)

It’s a small example of why Colbert’s alleged comedy during his time hosting The Late Show fell flat. But it’s an illustrative one. Provided an opportunity by one of his longtime professional friends to break with elite consensus, embrace common sense, and perhaps get a few laughs of his own . . . Colbert balked. Well, the joke’s on him now.