‘The Nightly Show’: Larry Wilmore Proved Race Matters in Late Night
“How was your day?” Larry Wilmore asked his audience on Monday night, a puckish reference to the news that had come down earlier in his day: His version of The Nightly Show had been canceled. He’ll host the final show on Thursday. Wilmore began politely, thanking Comedy Central for the opportunity to host the show for “the past 20 months,” expressing gratitude to his staff and to his audience — even the guy who tweeted (Wilmore put it up onscreen) “Wilmore Blows!! Bring back Colbert!!!”
When Wilmore said that his show’s “going off the air means only one thing: Racism is solved,” he may have been phrasing the sentiment as a joke, but it carried the heavy weight of bitter irony. The one show on the air that persisted in viewing much of pop culture and politics through the lens of race proved to be the one most quickly jettisoned by its network.
On Monday, Wilmore moved into one of his signature segments, “The Unblackening,” which covers the upcoming election and which, as the segment title suggests, he views primarily as the removal of Barack Obama from office. In recent weeks, Wilmore has made clear he has problems with both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but this night, his humor was — well, less humorous. Intentionally so.
Trump, he said, “has stopped being funny — he’s just downright dangerous. The worst of it is, he’s just a liar.” Wilmore went on, calling Trump “a psychopathic narcissist” and “an existential threat to America.” In all this, he was cheered on by the studio audience, which sensed it was witnessing a certain amount of steam being blown off by a freshly fired employee who no longer had to think about what his job would be like a week from now if he said what he REALLY thought.
I’m not going to say that if Wilmore had been this ferocious in the months preceding Comedy Central’s decision, he’d still have a job there — you really can’t maintain a humorous half-hour that is stoked primarily with frustration and tightly controlled anger at what you deem a potential catastrophe. Over the course of The Nightly Show, Wilmore proved to be an exceptionally likable host, and one of the things that turned out to be refreshing about him was that he was a grownup. I hadn’t realized how novel and invigorating it was to see an actual grown-up–a 54-year-old man who declined to act goofy, who spoke from real life experience–hosting a late-night comedy show, which only suggests that we ought to factor age as well as race and sex into the mix of diverse elements that figure into the altering of the late-night landscape.
I’m not going to pretend that I was a faithful watcher of Wilmore’s Nightly Show. At 11:30, the Colbert and Kimmel options pulled me away from Wilmore’s nightly efforts to, as he labeled it, “keep it 100.” One of the weaker aspects of Nightly was the panel segment featuring three guests. It was usually uneven, with each guest tending to either talk over one another or (more often) sitting sedately until Wilmore nodded his or her way: The conversation rarely flowed. On Monday night, the participants picked up on Wilmore’s opening theme — comic Robin Thede said of Trump, “We have to stop being entertained by the train wreck” — but few fresh points were made, and when even so free a spirit as Difficult People’s Julie Klausner seems constrained, you know that something is awkward about the format.
Some entity will replace the Nightly Show, and I’ll bet you 10 bucks it will be hosted by a woman. Good for her, whoever she is. As for Wilmore, he’ll do OK: He was going to be the showrunner for Black-ish before he got the Nightly gig, and he’s still an executive producer there, as well as for the upcoming (and very interesting) new HBO sitcom Insecure. I hope Wilmore’s remaining shows before he signs off on Thursday continue to be real barnburners of articulate rage.
The Nightly Show’s final episode will air Thursday at 11:30 p.m. on Comedy Central.
