By Josh Gondelman — 21 Jul 2025

#141. Stephen Colbert and The Jumbotron Couple

Fitting that it sorta kinda looks like the world is on fire behind him, right?

Now that this newsletter is on Ghost, it's helpful if readers who have the means want to become paid subscribers, which I think they can do here.

Hi everyone,

Just after I sent last week's newsletter, Maris's parents (who had graciously been pugsitting while we were on the west coast) returned our beloved Maggie the Pug to us, which has been the big excitement of the past several days. Even at our Los Angeles Airbnb, it felt wrong to not have a sentient loaf of bread who snores even while she is awake nearby at all times. Now that we have been reunited, we have our natural white noise (snorts) machine back, and no doorbell will ever go un-barked-at again, thank goodness.

Maris and I also saw Sunset Boulevard on Broadway which I somehow knew very little about. I should probably watch the movie (I know, I know!) because I thought the story was really compelling and the performances were very good (I was really blown away by the understudy who played Betty, which is often the case with understudies), but the music was not especially thrilling. The title song has been stuck in my head in the way the "what a pro wants" commercial was during last year's NBA playoffs. The use of cameras and screens really worked for me, especially since the show is about an actress obsessed with making a return to starring in movies. It's probably not a great sign for the entertainment industry (in which I ostensibly work) that I watched a 2.5 hour musical about a writer's psychosexual semi-imprisonment in the home of a delusional former movie star as they edited a script together and thought to myself: "Hey, at least he's working!"

The best musical performance we saw last week was our friend Michael absolutely CRUSHING "It's Oh So Quiet" by Bjork (unless it was the original version...hard to tell under these circumstances sometimes) at our other friend Rachel's karaoke birthday party. Dynamic vocal performance! Emotional investment! Physical commitment matched only by Rachel's rendition of "Torn" (Natalie Imbruglia's version). A great night!

I was fairly temperate on our Saturday evening out because I had to ("had to") play pickup basketball on Sunday afternoon where I performed embarrassingly but not humiliatingly. It was my first time jumping into a competitive game of hoops in a loooong time, and the gym was SO hot. I think I need to work on some conditioning before I go back, but I'm glad I went just to set a baseline! I was legit worried about puking at the gym, which did not happen, but I did grab a seltzer on my way back to the subway, and I will say the bubbles resulted in (how to say this delicately?) a burp I had to spit out.

Meanwhile, the results of my West Coast (and Back Home) Podcast Gauntlet continue to appear in the wider world. Thanks to everyone who has been so kind about my relentless (annoying?) press tour including the very nice guy in my neighborhood who I often see walking his extremely cute dog (named Spaghetti!) who told me he's listening to me on Doughboys and enjoying it. Speaking of...here's the rundown from the past week. I promise this deluge of media will wind down soon! There is just so much noise to break through with any creative endeavor, and I kind of feel like if anyone is irritated at how many podcasts I've been popping up on...that means I'm doing it right. That's what I've been telling myself at least, preemptively.

Nick Wiger, Me, and Mike Mitchell after recording Doughboys in the Headgum studio! — We doughed it!

I returned to the aforementioned Doughboys podcast to try the Fantastic Four movie tie-in pizza from Little Caesars!

I had a great chat with Alison Rosen on her podcast Alison Rosen is Your New Best Friend.

I took calls on the air with Andy Richter for his satellite radio show.

For Never Seen It with Kyle Ayers I wrote five pages of the movie Frozen, which I have never seen. I thought it would be fun to make it feel more like Manchester By The Sea which I have also never seen. My hilarious friend Lindsay Adams came by to read a character's lines and play some games. Here's a little video clip of me reading from the script.

Finally, I talked about the news with the great folks at Even More News. We really got into the right wing fractures over the Epstein Files, which may or may not exist, but we recorded like an hour before the Wall Street Journal published that unsettling letter Trump wrote to his old pal Jeff for his 50th birthday. Whoops!

A LITTLE LIVE SHOW UPDATE: I'm co-hosting tonight's Frankenstein's Baby show at Union Hall in Brooklyn, and then Leiby and I are co-hosting a Sup, Bro? show there on Sunday (7/27) at 5pm for our friend Robert Dean's birthday! In the meantime I will be presenting an award to Robert Klein and then headlining a show myself at the Borscht Belt Comedy festival in Ellenville, NY THIS SATURDAY (7/26). And I'll be attending Maris's book launch event at Left Bank Ciders in Catskill, NY on Wednesday night, the 23rd.

I've taken up enough of your time with promo stuff here, but if you scroll to the bottom of this email, you can find details for upcoming shows in TORONTO (next week!!!!), PHILADELPHIA, MINNEAPOLIS, BOSTON, FAIRFIELD, and a special Wait Wait-adjacent show I'm hosting in Brooklyn at the end of the summer!

PEP TALK FOR THE JUMBOTRON COUPLE

Two frames of the viral Coldplay cheating couple. One in which they seem stunned to see themselves on camera, and one where the woman is covering her eyes and the man's eyes are shocked. — Do you think they whispered to each other: "Do the opposite of acting natural!"

For the first time in what feels like quite some time, the internet's main characters were not masked ICE agents wantonly apprehending people across America or our rapidly decomposing president who spends his days spurring on fascism and trying to dodge responsibility for...well, basically everything he has done in his life up to this point. No, as last week came to a close, we were treated to a "good" old fashioned life-ruining of total randos.

If you were reading books or frolicking in nature over the past few days, the CEO of Astronomer (a company that promises "one platform for your entire data pipeline lifecycle," a phrase I am fortunate enough to have no need to understand) was caught on camera at a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts snuggled up to his company's head of HR.

Now, of course, they were not identified as such on the Jumbotron. While there are legitimate surveillance state-related questions of how the two were so quickly recognized, we are not quite at level of "funopticon" (recreational watchdogging) where two people at a concert are put on a big screen with the chyron "COWORKERS/PROBABLY CHEATING." We are, however, one degree from that point. When the pair (I'm not going to say "couple" because I don't know what label they use) appeared onscreen and the woman being snuggled quickly ducked out of frame, singer Chris Martin joked that they they were "having an affair or...just very shy." Hopefully, at the very least, that moment underscores that bland crowdwork comedy clips are so easy to create that even the guy who wrote "Fix You" (which is not funny at all) can generate them off the cuff.

If it was facial recognition technology that led to the doxxing of these two...let's call them likebirds, that is an illustration of how effective this tech has become and how easily it can be overused to target anyone in a public place, regardless of what their perceived transgression was. THAT SAID, from an opsec standpoint, if you are trying to keep an affair quiet, it is not a GREAT idea to conduct it in a venue with a capacity of 65,000 people, most of whom have working eyeballs. Nor is it a spectacular plan to stay joined in a prom picture-esque embrace when the venue's cinematographers point a camera in your direction.

There is an enormous chance that even if you did not behave in the literally most suspicious way on the Jumbotron, causing the footage to go massively viral, someone in the vicinity might have had an inkling of who you are and dropped a dime on you. This might have ended in a scandal regardless, resulting in Astronomy's CEO resigning (like he did in this timeline). I bet you wish that much like in the video for Coldplay's hit single "The Scientist" (with which you are no doubt familiar) you could reverse time and go *ahem* back to the start, before this ever happened.

Here's the thing: You're going to be fine. You are in the absolute best position to bounce back from this humiliation. First of all, the one of you who resigned is a CEO, a level of professional achievement so high it is hard to fail downward from it. Worst case scenario, you ascend to the plane of "thought leader." In virtually no industry is getting caught cheating on your wife with an employee an enduring professional liability. Is that good? It's not great...unless you are a CEO who has recently resigned for doing just that. (And while I don't think infidelity is good, I don't know what these folks' particular arrangements are, but the fact that an executive was spotted with a professional subordinate who seemed flabbergasted to be caught on camera together with him is not a GREAT sign.)

We maybe should not, as a society, tear down people's lives based on embarrassing but non-malignant viral videos. That said, this is an extremely rigorous test case for that principle considering what consequences many people wish to be visited upon the heads of many tech CEOs for the stuff they do as part of their jobs. So let's all agree to learn and grow from this. And next time, maybe choose someone outside your office to have an extramarital affair with, and/or remember the existence of dimly-lit Italian restaurants.

PEP TALK FOR STEPHEN COLBERT

Stephen Colbert soaking in the audience's boos after he announced the cancellation of the Late Show. — Image poached from the Late Show's YouTube channel.

Last week, Stephen Colbert announced that he'd been told that he would no longer be hosting the Late Show for CBS starting next year, and on top of that no one would be hosting the show at all. To be clear, there will not be a Late Show starting next summer. CBS did not innovate a way to have ChatGPT behind the desk, although if they could get away with it, they'd try for sure. The network described the show's cancellation as a "financial decision" despite Colbert consistently winning his time slot, which would feel suspicious even if he hadn't just gone on the air to criticize his parent company's decision to pay a $16 million dollar settlement to our nation's chief extortionist now that the Supreme Court declared the presidency to be in a permanent state of The Purge and Paramount is working on a merger that needs government approval.

This, to put it lightly and 90sly, bites. It's a bummer that a CBS has announced it is dumping both of its late night comedy shows within the past six months. It's a drag that one of them was the only network show in its genre with a female host and that the other seems politically motivated at the same level fleeing a Jumbotron Kiss Cam seems affair-motivated. It stinks that so many steady entertainment jobs based in New York City are disappearing because of the rising tide of fascism (which is not the worst consequence of fascism, but it's somewhere farther down the list) or (if we're credulously taking CBS at their word) because a network can't figure out how to monetize an industry leading program that it's produced for decades. And, as is often the case with That's Marvelous, we are now two paragraphs into a pep talk with no optimism in sight.

The way to take heart in this is to see what it means to speak truth to power on a stage with real consequences, which has always been Stephen Colbert's greatest comedic gift. I loved when his interviews on The Colbert Report seemed to flummox guests. And his routine at the 2006 White House Correspondents' dinner is (imo) a landmark moment in American comedy history. People talk all the time (often disingenuously) about a "chilling effect" on free speech coming from various corners (those pesky college students and their "wokeness!"), but that is clearly the intent here. And maybe I'm being a starry-eyed doofus, but I think that watching someone speak out clearly for what they believe in despite the consequences will embolden MORE people to be brave. At least I have to hope that will be the case.

For the last few days, I've seen scattered people bringing up Colbert's occasional missteps over the years. And maybe it's my own personal bias, but I think now is not the time to dance on the professional grave (or, let's say, professional gurney...he'll be back) of someone who is facing consequences not for something he did wrong but for something he did right. Especially while so many people in and around comedy are thriving thanks to the ethos: "I will say mostly bad things because there's a colossal market for that." (I've been joking that Maris's book took the vastly more principled and wildly less lucrative tack of critiquing the Democratic establishment from the left rather than the right.) Although my thoughts and prayers do go out to Joe Rogan who was apparently tricked into voting for Donald Trump and now has some regrets. Specifically thoughts are that he's a mark and my prayers are for him to read a book.

I hope the many good people employed by the Late Show land on their feet quickly and that Colbert uses his remaining months on the air impactfully. The reason I feel that hope is not some kind of baby-brained belief that the world is a fundamentally fair place, but because people like Stephen Colbert are willing to take risks to call bullshit when they smell bullshit.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
In The Meantime - "Old Gum"

I shouted out my friend Dan Levy and his band In The Meantime on CBS Mornings (because Dan was the one who nudged me to do open mics in Boston in 2004), and now they are making me look good by putting out this song that rips with a video that hops around and lyrics that swing an emotional cinderblock. In The Meantime has been working on a new album for a while (I think I can say that publicly) but for now we get this song off of a compilation from the Canadian record label of the bands they're about to go on tour with.

I love when my friends make art that I can enjoy and tell other people about!

Side note: I also really enjoyed Please Don't Destroy's new special on YouTube, which I'm not just saying because Ben Marshall graciously picked up the slack for me on the basketball court last weekend when I was dragging ass.