Here's Byron

Replacing Stephen Colbert with Byron Allen would be like replacing Pat Oliphant with Garfield

Daryl Cagle distributes more political cartoons than any other syndicate in the business, and each week he publishes the top ten cartoons from his service that are being published by his newspaper clients. I normally don't look at it because it makes me sick.

This is not meant as a criticism of Cagle, even though I believe he's doing everything in his power to destroy our industry just to make a nickel, nor is it a criticism of the cartoons that make his top ten list. A lot of cartoonists who draw hard-hitting cartoons often draw something nice, or even bland, on occasion. It doesn't mean that they're not good cartoonists. Although there are cartoonists who do nothing but draw boring, bland, generic, copy-and-paste cartoons, like Dave Granlund.

What makes me sick about Cagle’s top ten list is that it is what editors want, and what editors want is safe. They do not want cartoons that are irreverent or challenging. They don't want anything that is opinionated. They don't want to publish a cartoon that will receive an angry letter or a phone call. They view opinion as dangerous.

Take this week’s top ten list, for example. It includes a couple of sappy Memorial Day cartoons, a couple of cartoons about AI, another is about potholes, and another is about allergy season. These are safe because nobody is going to call the editor to defend potholes and hayfever. That means there are only four out of 10 cartoons that might offer something a reader would disagree with. And one of those four cartoons criticizes Democrats and Republicans, so that only leaves three cartoons with an opinion about politics. The hardest-hitting one of the bunch is by Steve Sack, which is not a surprise because he's awesome.

And if Byron Allen were a political cartoonist, well, there wouldn't be any politics to it. He would be more like a Dave Grandlund, and definitely not like a Steve Sack.

I am sure it is true that CBS was losing money on Stephen Colbert and The Late Show, but two things can be true at once. That is not the main reason they ended The Late Show. CBS ended the late show because it made Donald Trump very unhappy. Donald Trump cannot take any criticism.

Paramount Skydance, the owners of CVS, announced last July that it was discontinuing “The Late Show,” citing it as a “purely a financial decision,” just as it was seeking approval from the Trump administration for the merger of Paramount and Skydance. CBS claims that The Late Show, which led the late-night ratings for nine consecutive years, was losing $40 million a year, yet they bumped Colbert's salary up to $15 million a year in 2023. How did things go so wrong in the span of two years?

As I mentioned, Colbert was critical of the Trump administration. He was topical and irreverent. And he was hilarious. His nightly monologues were a public service. If you are a MAGAt, you would not find him funny at all. If you were a newspaper editor, you would think he was dangerous. So what are they going to replace Colbert with? Infommercials? Well, kind of.

CBS is not going to pay out millions to produce a replacement for The Late Show. What will now go into this timeslot will be a show produced by billionaire comedian Byron Allen called Comedians Unleashed. If that sounds like something dangerous, relax, because it's not. Byron Allen is actually paying CBS for his show to fill this timeslot. How that works (not that I understand the business entirely) is that Allen will receive most of the ad revenue, and CBS will not lose any money by producing a TV show.

Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen is a comedy roundtable that has been around for at least 20 years, and which you have probably never heard of. As A.V. Club describes it, “Every episode of Comics Unleashed is the same: Allen performs a brief observational monologue before hosting four comics for 20 minutes, lobbing them heavy-handed set-ups for the prewritten material they’ve brought with them. Inoffensive, apolitical, and utterly nontopical, it’s an advertiser’s dream. It’s also the rare TV series that’s better known for its “time-buy” business model than the quality of its content. Allen produces the show through his Allen Media Group (née the hilariously vague Entertainment Studios) imprint, buys airtime that would normally go to infomercials, and gets to keep the revenue from the commercials that air during the show.”

Allen has promised that the show will not feature any politics or anything racial, sexist, or homophobic, which I'm sure nobody's asking for, but this will make CBS, and more importantly, the Trump administration happy. Even Greg Gutfeld's crap has more teeth than this shit.

The late Norm Macdonald said of Comics Unleashed, “Oh, you couldn’t be more leashed.” The show itself is a punchline for stand-up comedians for its tight rules, apolitical nature, and low pay. It's pretty bad when a comedy show is mocked by comedians. Since Byron Allen is paying for this time slot, he can put basically anything he wants in it, including reruns. The first week of shows in Colbert's timeslot will feature the comedian John Witherspoon, who has been dead since 2019. This is such an apolitical show that it can broadcast seven-year-old reruns.

Comics Unleashed has already made its debut on CBS, the night after The Late Show’s finale. And during his opening monologue, Allen thanked the late night pioneers that came before him, such as Steve Allen, Jack Paar, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Joan Rivers, Arsenio Hall, Bill Maher, Chelsea Handler, John Oliver, Conan O’Brien, Seth Meyers, Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, and the great Stephen Colbert, without mentioning the controversy of Colbert's cancellation. And then he thanked CBS, Google, YouTube, and Procter & Gamble…and then he ran a Head & Shoulders commercial. I guess Byron is thanking P&G for their money, and not for the results of its most famous product, because he's bald.

Byron Allen is more of a businessman than he is a comedian. He owns The Weather Channel and The Weather Channel en Español, Ten 24-hour cable networks, including Comedy.TV, Cars.TV, JusticeCentral.TV, Recipe.TV, Pets.TV, MyDestination.TV and ES.TV.
He owns Local Now, a free ad-supported streaming service, HBCU GO, and Sports.TV. He owns TheGrio, a digital news platform with over 20 million annual visitors.
He owns Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures, the first African American-owned multi-platform studio distributing wide-release theatrical films, including 2017’s highest-grossing independent film, 47 Meters Down.
He owns Freestyle Digital Media, a multi-platform digital distribution arm.
He owns several network-affiliated broadcast television stations across the country.
He has a 10.7% stake in Starz with stated plans to acquire full control.
He has a controlling 52% stake in BuzzFeed, including HuffPost and Tasty.

Additionally, in 2019, he partnered with Sinclair Broadcast Group to acquire 21 regional sports networks from Walt Disney and Fox Corporation in a deal valued at $10.6 billion, one of the largest media transactions of that year. Sinclair, the largest owner of local television stations in the U.S., regularly mandates conservative commentary and programming on its affiliates that heavily favor Trump’s political messaging.

Byron Allen should be commended, not just for being a black businessman in the media business, but for opening the doors for other black Americans to succeed in media. But he is not pushing the envelope, and he's not bringing anything to American culture. If Byron were white, he would be mayonnaise. You will never hear Byron Allen criticize the Trump administration's racism and how it has discriminated against black Americans and brought back Jim Crow. Does Byron Allen have an opinion about Fort Johnson being reverted to its Confederate name of Fort Polk? If he does, you will never hear it on Comics Unleashed.

The cancellation of the late show is a huge loss for America, whether you believe Stephen Colbert is funny or not. And Comics Unleashed brings nothing of value to the country like The Late Show did.

Of course, Donald Trump never found Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel funny. And MAGAts will tell me that they are not funny, but it doesn't matter what they think because MAGAts aren't famous for having a sense of humor. These people think Greg Gutfeld is funny (he’s not), who once described himself as the conservative John Stewart.

But you will never hear a left-wing comedian describe himself as the liberal Greg Gutfeld. And you will never hear a late-night talk show host describe himself as the next Byron Allen.

Creative note: I'm happy I was able to do a cartoon about AI and Stephen Colbert in one cartoon.

I was lazy with my lettering today, and I did not want to have to write “being replaced by” twice. So I copied and pasted those three words, which meant adding another layer. I had to resize the lettering, which is difficult when it's on two different layers. So my solution was to take a screen capture of it, then erase all of it, and import the screen capture into the cartoon and size it from there. It's OK if you don't understand that because I barely understand it myself, but it worked.

Also, it's supposed to be my day off.

Without adding any context, someone on Facebook called me a racist for this cartoon.

Drawn in 30 seconds:

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