Too all you whiners who claim it was cancelled due to politics...
http://imdb.com/news/sb/2005-10-19
Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, a companion piece to The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, drew 1.1 million viewers for its premiere on Monday, about the same number as The Daily Show itself, which preceded it. The audience was more than twice the size of Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn, which aired in the same spot a year ago. Critics generally lavished much praise on the initial show, in which Stephen Colbert plays a pompous news anchor, who's depressingly insecure beneath his public front. Beth Gillin in the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: "What makes the portrayal so funny is that it rings so true, and the show gives Colbert plenty of room to explore the comic tensions between a blowhard anchor and his gooey soft center." Matthew Gilbert in the Boston Globe called Colbert's debut "auspicious," and added: "While Stewart keeps one foot on Earth and rolls his eyes skyward, Colbert skyrockets into absurdity as an out-and-out parody of a celebrity commentator. With his blowhard vocal pattern and patriotic pretenses, he's a living, breathing caricature of Bill O'Reilly." But David Bianculli in the New York Daily News, while approving Colbert's parody of over-produced news programs, expressed disappointment with its avoidance of any issues of the day. "To be too relevant, perhaps, would be stepping on Stewart's toes," he wrote, "but to truly lampoon shows like O'Reilly, The Colbert Report has to mimic and play with not just the visual style of those shows and pundits, but their verbal substance, too." And Maureen Ryan observed in the Chicago Tribune: "The biggest question hanging over The Colbert Report is whether the show's sendup of the pomposity and fear-mongering of cable news blowhards will be as appealing in the long term as the satire of public figures and the news media as a whole in The Daily Show." Kay McFadden in the Seattle Times didn't find even the premiere appealing, writing that "too often, The Colbert Report went to heavy-handed lengths to make sure the audience got jokes that weren't very funny. The effect was like a chapter of Satire for Dummies."
So there you go. The reason why Tough Crowd got cancelled wasn't due to its politics, it got cancelled because have the audience automatically tuned out the moment they saw him on screen. I mean, the guy couldn't even rally a republican audience to decent numbers during an election year. How sad is that?
The other factor is that Colbert is a brilliant actor who can successfully play a "depressingly insecure beneath his public front." Colin Quinn, unfortunately, was the real deal. Something that all the stuttering in the world wouldn't fix. share