Donald Trump’s war on late-night, which ushered in the demise of the Late Show franchise and removed Stephen Colbert from the airwaves, isn’t “cancel culture,” comedian Wanda Sykes argued—it’s “fascism.”
Sykes appeared on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast on Wednesday, where she was asked about Trump’s efforts to “cancel” comedians he doesn’t like.
“Has cancel culture actually started to become a real thing when people like Jimmy Kimmel are now with Colbert or whatever?” interviewer Scott Feinberg wondered.
“This isn’t cancel culture. This is fascism,” Sykes declared.
“If you get canceled when people don’t want to hear from you anymore… you’re canceled. If you can’t get booked or people don’t want to buy tickets, that’s being canceled,” she explained. “This is from the government, trying to shut us down and trying to end freedom of speech. So that’s two different things.”
Sykes’ comments come after Trump’s comedy foes faced threats of government intervention on their broadcasts or being taken off the air.
Kimmel was suspended indefinitely from ABC following jokes he made about MAGA’s reaction to the death of Charlie Kirk. Kimmel has said he did not know whether he would ever be allowed back on the air at the time. Sykes was scheduled to be his guest on the episode that would have immediately followed his suspension.
Ultimately, the forced hiatus lasted just six days before he delivered his record-breaking return monologue in September. But since then, the first lady has called on ABC directly to fire Kimmel for what she called “hateful rhetoric,” following jokes he made about her age gap with the president.
Colbert’s Late Show was a regular target for the president’s late-night diatribes on social media, as he repeatedly slammed the host, whom he called “REALLY DUMB,” and insisted the series had “no ratings.” When Trump’s buddy David Ellison acquired CBS’ parent company Paramount, Colbert criticized the merger and CBS’ $16.5 million settlement to Trump as a “bribe,” and his show’s cancellation was announced days later.
Paramount insists the decision was “purely financial.”
Trump’s crackdown hasn’t been limited to late-night TV. His FCC opened an investigation into the popular daytime show The View, which is hosted by several fierce critics of the president, arguing that the show should be subjected to a long-abandoned “equal-time” rule that would force it to host Republican candidates as often as Democratic ones.
Sykes, who’s been a guest on all three shows, told Awards Chatter that discussing politics in comedy isn’t like it used to be.
Trump is “so far out there that basically if you just repeat what he did or said, people are laughing already,” she said on Wednesday. “So now it’s like, well, what’s the punchline? What’s the twist?” she said, opining that it’s difficult to “parody a parody.”
“It would be good for comedy if his followers weren’t so rabid about talking about him… George W. Bush, we could make jokes about him,” she explained, because “they were a tight party back under him. And we were at war. So you could make a joke, and they may disapprove, but it was like you could get a chuckle out of them. Like, ‘Alright, OK, that was a good one, but I don’t agree with you.’”
She concluded, “Now you can’t do that.”
