Director Judd Apatow knows a thing or two about bubbles.
The former king of R-rated comedies ("Knocked Up," "Trainwreck," "The 40-Year-Old Virgin") could have fought back against Cancel Culture. Instead, he said nothing as woke scolds told us which jokes were "approved" and which ones needed to be memory-holed.
Apatow, a loud and proud progressive, was either in denial about the cultural forces crushing comedy, or his Hollywood bubble didn't let reality reach him. (He's far from alone on that front.)
It's unclear which is worse, but we do know his 2022 Netflix comedy "The Bubble" earned him some of the worst reviews of his often exemplary career.
Now, Apatow is coming to the defense of free speech and, more specifically, late-night comedy.
Yes, the same Apatow who stood down during The Twitter Files scandal, the rise of sensitivity readers and social media platforms censoring opinions now has something to say about The First Amendment.
Now, that's funny (just not ha-ha funny).
Apatow bemoaned Stephen Colbert's slow-motion cancellation over at CBS via a new Rolling Stone op-ed. Yes, that's the same Rolling Stone that attacked Dave Chappelle for telling trans jokes and, like Apatow, said nothing as Cancel Culture ran roughshod over speech.
First, Apatow takes us on a Memory Lane tour of when late-night TV mattered, from the great Johnny Carson to David Letterman's stupid pet tricks era. Late-night even held our hand following the Sept. 11 attacks, letting us join together to grieve and find ways to laugh again.
True. All true.
Except that late-night TV is as dead as plans for a "Snow White" sequel. The modern version is a hard-Left landscape where hosts ignore headlines that paint Democrats in a negative light.
Democratic candidate Graham Platner has a Nazi tattoo? Heck, that's news to us! Rep. Eric Swalwell resigned in disgrace? Maybe we'll get to that after the latest President Trump harangue.
Or, most likely, we won't.
Next, Apatow explains why we need late-night humorists to process the world for us.
You can’t give enough credit to people like Kimmel and Colbert and Fallon and Seth Meyers for the Herculean feat that is. Imagine it was your job to wake up in the morning and look at what happened in the Iran War and know you have to go do an 11-minute monologue about it. It’s almost unbelievable that they pull it off, ever.
Yes, the current Iran War is so catastrophic that it dwarfs other news cycles over the past 40-odd years, like the Oct. 7 attacks, the Boston Marathon bombing, three assassination attempts on a sitting president and more.
See how thick Apatow's bubble is? Bullets likely bounce right off of it.
Next, the writer/director flexes his funny bone.
But the hosts we have now, you can tell, are going to fight until their last breath to be allowed to express themselves. That’s what America’s all about. It’s supposed to be the place where we have these voices — all voices on the political spectrum.
Yes, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and Colbert do all they can to share "all voices" on their shows. A late 2025 survey by the invaluable Newsbusters site showed that 99 percent of late-night guests were liberal.
Some spectrum.
To Apatow, political diversity is the chasm between Sen. Elizabeth Warren's far-Left policies and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's warmed-over socialism.
Naturally, Apatow doesn't mention the fact that Colbert's "Late Show" was losing $40 million a year, an inconvenient fact progressives and Legacy Media types (but we repeat ourselves) have quickly forgotten.
Late-night TV was destined to fade away in our complex digital age. We no longer need broadcast TV to settle us into our beds at night. Our smartphones and iPad fodder do the heavy lifting these days.
Still, Apatow's bubbled mindset helps explain why late-night hosts hastened the format's extinction.
