Chuck

Sharing this in honor of a very dear friend of mine, who passed away days ago. I shared this with him just last month, and it resonated deeply. I hope you take a minute to read and contemplate. #disability #disabilityrights #disablism #ablism #handicap #handicapped #accessibility

@bangbangchannel @DustinMassey101 @AlmotsGraps Sure. I’m not denying that many folks watched both. I’m saying many US fans did watch only one promotion in 1994, contrary to OP’s claim.

Bruh in 94 my schedule was literally WWF on Monday, WCW on Tuesday cause I had to tape it Monday during Raw and go to school in the morning, there was some local promotion that came on on Thursday, SMW was on Fridays, WCW on Saturday morning, WWF on Saturday noon, whoever’s quarterly PPV on Sunday. I think the era where everyone watched everything was in like 97/98 when ECW and tape trading got really big.

imagine being a WWF only guy in 1994 and seeing this shit

@DustinMassey101 @AlmotsGraps Yes. Like I said, there were two options in 1994: WWF and WCW. Plenty of people only watched one promotion. This is a documented fact. A huge portion of WCW’s audience never made the jump to WWF when the promotion was bought out in 2001.

@Chuck0slovakia @AlmotsGraps Nope WCW had 2 shows WCW Saturday night and WCW Main event on Sunday’s. We consumed all wrestling we could in the 90s because there wasn’t as much content. There were also syndicated WCW shows. Pro, worldwide and power hour. They typically aired in the morning

@gothburz ChatGPT slop. All the hallmarks of the LLM writing style: the short, staccato sentences; the overuse of “it’s not just ___, it’s ____”; the overuse of em-dashes; the “instead of ___, people ___;” the “not __, not ___, but ___” You fucking suck.

I am the Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS. I am the person who turned a comedian into a priest and charged advertisers to watch the congregation. I want to be precise about what I built. Not a comedy show. A permission structure. For eleven years, six million Americans tuned in every night to find out what they were allowed to believe by morning. We didn't sell jokes. We sold certainty. Certainty costs nothing to produce. People will pay anything for it. We charged $50 million a year and still lost money because it turns out permission is even cheaper than we thought. In 2014, we had a genuinely dangerous comedian. A man who once testified before Congress in character as a fictional conservative pundit and made the entire chamber look like they'd been pantsed on C-SPAN. His fake persona was the most brilliant satire on television. Layered. Ironic. Unpredictable. The character could say anything because nothing was real. The character was the art. The character was the comedian. We killed the character and put the real man on stage. The real man was a lecturer. Earnest. Thoughtful. Correct about everything. Correct is not funny. Correct is not dangerous. Correct is the absence of danger. We promoted the absence of danger and called it growth. His character could make a Senate committee squirm. The real him makes an audience nod. Nodding pays the same as squirming. Nodding is easier to produce. His final words on air were "We love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love is doing this show with you." The audience wept. I wrote that line. Not the words. The architecture that made those words feel true. For eleven years, the audience believed they were participants. They were not participants. They were the product. "With you" is what you say to a congregation. A comedian says "at you." We hadn't said "at you" since 2015. Our internal metric was called Affirm Rate. It measured the percentage of monologue segments that generated applause instead of laughter. I invented this metric. I also invented the bonus structure tied to it. In 2015, our Affirm Rate was 34%. By 2022, it was 94%. I received a raise every year. We are crushing it. At the things I made up. That's performance management. But I need to tell you about the real discovery. The one I put in a deck called "Content Strategy 2019-2024." The one that got me promoted. Agreement gets applause. I knew that early. But correction — telling the audience their vocabulary is slightly outdated, their outrage is aimed two degrees off-center, their feelings are valid but their phrasing needs work — correction gets them back tomorrow. Agreement is a transaction. Correction is a subscription. We converted a comedy show into a nightly software update for moral vocabulary. Churn was near zero. They couldn't afford to miss an episode. Missing an episode meant using last week's words in this week's meeting. That's social death. We monetized the fear of social death and called it entertainment. I want to be honest about something. The content was not bipartisan. We chose a side. But I need you to understand: we did not choose it because we believed in it. We chose it because that side's audience is more responsive to correction. They want to be updated. They want to be told their language is outdated. They experience correction as care. The other side does not respond to correction. They respond to provocation. Provocation is harder to monetize. You can't build a subscription on provocation because the audience doesn't come back to learn — they come back to fight. Fighting is unpredictable. Correction is scheduled. We optimized for the audience that wants to be told what to think. That audience leaned one direction. That's not ideology. That's market segmentation. The writers' room had a whiteboard. In 2015 it said "What's funny?" In 2018 it said "What should they feel?" By 2021 it said "What are they still saying wrong?" I watched that whiteboard evolve like a finch beak and I never intervened. The market was speaking. We listened. Listening to the market is the same as leading the audience. They can't tell the difference. A writer named Marcus raised his hand in 2019. "What if we just tried to make them laugh again?" I thanked him for his passion and scheduled a creative alignment conversation. He transferred to streaming development within the month. The Affirm Rate the week he left was 91%. Laughter would have brought it down. That's risk management. Here is what nobody will say out loud. I will say it because I am proud of it. We made our audience worse at politics. Not better. Worse. Every night for eleven years, we expressed their outrage for them. Professionally. With a band and good lighting. And because the outrage had been expressed — because a man in a suit had furrowed his brow with the precise calibrated degree of indignation — they didn't need to express it themselves. They watched. They clapped. They felt the catharsis of resistance without resisting anything. They went to bed having done nothing and feeling like they'd done something. That's the product. Not comedy. Not information. Catharsis. Catharsis is the enemy of action. A man who has screamed into a pillow does not then also scream in the street. We were the pillow. A $50 million pillow with a house band. If you feel the outrage has been expressed for you, you will not march. You will not organize. You will not call your representative. You will tune in tomorrow to feel it expressed again. That's retention. Our retention was extraordinary. I want to talk about the comedy-to-catechism pipeline because I think people underestimate what we achieved. Stage one: comedian makes jokes about the powerful. Audience laughs because the powerful are absurd. This is the Carlin model. The jester punches up. Everyone below feels relief. Stage two: comedian makes jokes about people who disagree with the audience. Audience laughs because disagreement is stupid. The jester has turned around. He's still on the stage but now he's facing the crowd with a pointer. Stage three: comedian stops making jokes. Comedian identifies incorrect beliefs and explains why they're dangerous. Audience does not laugh. Audience claps. The jester is gone. In his place: a hall monitor with a desk and a band. Stage four: audience watches not for entertainment but for certification. Having seen last night's episode means you know which words are current. Not having seen it means you might use yesterday's vocabulary in today's meeting. The show is no longer comedy. It is a credential. Watching it means you are educated. Not watching means you are the person being discussed. We made a show that you watch to prove you're not the kind of person who doesn't watch it. That's a closed loop. Closed loops don't need content. They need continuity. We provided continuity for $50 million a year. A comedian — whose entire historical function was to say things too dangerous for anyone else to say — became the person who decides which things are too dangerous for anyone to say. And the audience applauded. Every night. For 2,500 nights. Because being told what is forbidden feels exactly like being told what you already knew. Prohibition performed as validation. I put that in the deck too. Our audience was correct about everything. I know this because they applauded everything we said. The applause proved the correctness. The correctness justified the applause. We called this audience research. The methodology was peer-reviewed by the audience. They approved unanimously. Every night. The actually funny comedians left. They went to podcasts. To clubs. To rooms where the audience doesn't know what's coming and that uncertainty is the point. They took the laughter with them. We kept the applause. We called those spaces problematic. That's market differentiation. The problematic spaces are funnier. But funny is not our product. We lost $40 million a year. We didn't lose it because the show failed. We lost it because we spent $50 million producing what a podcast host in his garage gives away between mattress ads. The podcast is funnier. The podcast is more dangerous. The podcast has an audience that laughs instead of claps. But we had the Ed Sullivan Theater. We had 461 seats. We had a former Beatle play the farewell episode. Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, and Louis Cato playing "Hello, Goodbye" like it was a benediction. I booked a Beatle for a funeral. The Beatles played that stage in 1964 and the audience screamed so loud you couldn't hear the music. Our audience didn't scream. They wept politely. That's the difference between entertainment and church. We ran a church. Jon Stewart showed up to the finale and did a bit where he pretended to deliver a corporate statement from Paramount about the cancellation. The audience laughed. It was the first time they laughed in a way I didn't recognize. Involuntary. Surprised. Dangerous. For ninety seconds, a comedian was in that building. Then it was over. John Oliver said "At some point, this may come for all of our shows" and then added "but Stephen, what's important to remember is that tonight, it is going to eat you." The audience laughed again. Involuntary again. Two moments of actual comedy in a three-hour farewell. Both of them about death. The finale drew 6.74 million viewers. Biggest weeknight audience in our history. More people came to the funeral than ever visited the patient. I know what they were mourning. Not comedy. The comedy died in 2016. Not the man. The man is fine. He's wealthy. What they mourned was the permission structure. Starting today, they have to decide what to believe on their own. They have to form an opinion without waiting for a man behind a desk to form it first and deliver it with a knowing look. Some of them haven't done that since 2015. The funeral wasn't for the show. It was for the certainty. He joked about the Peanuts theme music licensing cost on his last night. "Oh no! I hope this doesn't cost CBS any money!" The audience laughed. It was a joke about money. About the network losing money. The last joke was about money. Not about truth. Not about power. About a licensing fee for a cartoon piano riff. Eleven years and the final joke was about accounting. I think that's perfect. The show was always about accounting. We just dressed it up as conscience. The President of the United States — the man we spent eleven years explaining was dangerous to an audience that already believed he was dangerous — posted an AI-generated video of our host being thrown into a dumpster on the Late Show set. Then Trump danced to "YMCA" in the clip. Viewed more times in four hours than our farewell managed in a week. His production cost: zero. Ours: negative $50 million a year. We manufactured his relevance every night at 11:35 for eleven years and he never paid us a dime. We were his marketing department. He turned our funeral into content. His ROI was infinite. Ours required a write-off and a farewell concert. The Strike Force Five — Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver — appeared in a segment about late-night losing "one middle-aged white man who makes jokes about the news." They were joking about their own obsolescence. All of them know. None of them will say it. The format is dead. The audience moved to phones. The phones don't have desks or bands. The phones have men in garages who are allowed to be wrong, allowed to be surprised, allowed to say something their audience hasn't already approved. That's comedy. We stopped doing that a decade ago. We did approval. Approval looks like comedy from a distance. Up close it's church. I do not feel guilt. Guilt would require me to believe I took something from them. I didn't take anything. They came to us. Every night. They chose the catechism over the comedy. They preferred correction over surprise. Certainty over danger. Instruction over laughter. They wanted to be told. Not challenged. Not shocked. Not made to laugh against their will at something they didn't see coming. They wanted to see it coming. They wanted to mouth along. That's not comedy. That's karaoke. We ran the most expensive karaoke bar in television history and the only miscalculation was charging a cover when the songs are free on every phone. We turned a jester into a priest. We turned an audience into a congregation. We turned laughter into obedience. We turned political engagement into passive consumption. We turned a comedy show into a permission structure and charged $50 million a year to tell people what they already believed in a voice slightly nicer than their own. They were so grateful they showed up to mourn us. 6.74 million of them. Weeping. For the certainty. Applause is more reliable than laughter. I proved it. The proof cost $450 million, one character, one comedian's capacity for danger, and one audience's willingness to act. The metric went up.

@DustinMassey101 @AlmotsGraps In the US in 1994, yes, you were probably only watching WWF. You only had two choices: WWF or WCW, and Nitro hadn’t started yet. Your only chance to catch WCW was a Saturday night show buried on TBS at 7 PM.

@AlmotsGraps I don’t think anyone was only watching WWF back in the day.

@LarryBundyJr I can’t find any record of a YouTube account named “JoeLizzaWWE,” nor can I find any record of a “Joe Lizza” who produces wrestling content.

An automated A.I. WWE news channel on YouTube tries to pronounce "WWE" as a word and ends up going insane!🤣

@conankirks I think it exploded because Oliver’s irritation mirrors many people’s own annoyance with Jimmy Fallon.

WHY DID THIS BLOW UP

The last part is not quite accurate—Craig has spoken about this publicly. Craig said that Letterman’s production company always protected his show from network meddling, since it owned the time slot. However, when Letterman left, ownership of the 12:35 slot would revert back to CBS, meaning they could meddle with Craig’s show. Craig was already getting burned out and certainly didn’t want to do the show if he’d now have to adhere to CBS’s whims, so he decided not to renew.

@Chuck0slovakia @ImKingGinger He left a few months before Letterman. When Letterman was on 11:35, he essentially had the rights to the whole two hours and Letterman picked Craig Ferguson to host 12:35. When Letterman decided to leave, CBS didn’t want to keep Ferguson.

On another timeline, Stephen Colbert never became the host of The Late Show and these guys are still reading viewer emails. Never forget what CBS took from us.

@AldrichPatrick @EricMGarcia Paul’s played this song live tons. He used to open concerts with it.

@EricMGarcia Don’t care much about Colbert ending his Late Night run, but I got chills. This is a song I thought could never be played live.

This is so beautiful on so many levels. Colbert has said he can’t listen to “Band on the Run” because that song was popular the year his father and brothers were killed in a plane crash. Now, here he is with Sir Paul, closing out his show with his beautiful family.

@fammetaX How many people do you think have $216,000 in liquid cash lying around to throw into the stock market? Either this tweet is aimed at about 0.5% of the population, or you’re a fucking idiot. .

It’s 2030 and you bought 1,000 shares of $NVDA at $216 today $NVDA hits $1,000/share Your position: $1,000,000 Your quarterly dividend: $250 every 3 months forever You paid $219,000 The stock paid it back What’s stopping you from buying today?

@CartoonsHateHer Cuck fetishes are just DoorDash for pussy eating. Call a man to come to your home and eat the pussy for you!

nobody is ready to talk about how a guy who doesn't eat pussy may have sensory issues, may not have the privilege to be familiar with female anatomy, just worked multiple shifts and doesn't have any emotional bandwidth left for it....but no you just wanna be privileged

@thebornloserr @Howlingmutant0 It’s a small business and these women literally run the company. The “Gen Z boss” is the founder and CEO. What’s with you weirdos grafting your own bizarre narrative onto this video?

@Howlingmutant0 I genuinely think it’s one of the greatest videos ever made. This is what women thought they were fighting for civil rights, they think working is just dancing around while new hires get the workload dumped on them

I was so pissed about this I was in a really bad place

@v64jr @_MTGM_ @Gilition @v64jr You are correct. The guy who posted this is a fucking idiot.

@_MTGM_ @Gilition O RLY? The voice is literally based on white character Senator Claghorn, who was based on an actual Texas rancher. Meanwhile, the same cartoon also features black ducks that are supposed to be Italian skinheads. It’s a southern white caricature. Admit it.

I know this joke is horrible and offensive but it's so fucking stupid I can't help but find it a guilty pleasure

@Web3Marmot @Ryanblythmusic You genuinely believe that most human beings alive today won’t live another 18 years?

@Ryanblythmusic Bro, 18 years just to get back to dot-com peak. Most folks won't even live that long.

🚨 THIS IS NOT NORMAL SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are preparing to go public. All at once. To absorb these giants, the market will need to find $200 BILLION in fresh liquidity. This is a brutal stress test for global investors. To buy into these IPOs, big funds need a lot of cash. They will ruthlessly cut overextended tech. First in line: NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Google. But these companies hold up the entire S&P 500. If they start to fall, the index will follow. We saw this before during the COVID bubble. Dozens of tech companies (Rivian, Coinbase, Robinhood) hit the market at crazy high prices. When the Fed hiked rates and liquidity dried up, these stocks crashed 80%. The AI and tech sectors are already running on fumes. Add a $200B drain, and you get a systemic flush. Get positioned before this massive rotation begins. As a reminder, I’ve called every major market turn for the last 10 years, including the $111K BTC peak in October. Turn on notifications. I will guide you through this liquidity squeeze, and when the real bottom finally forms, I’ll call it here publicly.

@realDonaldTrump The funniest thing about this is that AI Colbert clearly assists Trump by jumping, like a wrestler receiving a chokeslam. Even in Trump’s fictional dream world, he’s not strong enough to lift Colbert lmao

@jasonwblakely @hecubian_devil I don’t think it was intended as “resistance.” I think it was intended as a celebration of the show, of late night TV in general, and of the Ed Sullivan theater. It was almost completely devoid of political content.

I admire Colbert's wit & I don't think he should have lost his show *but* elite liberals throwing themselves encomia parties with A-list celebrities as their form of symbolic resistance amounts to nothing politically & is part of what brought us to the current ideological impasse

This post is premised on the stupid assumption that people have no interest or knowledge in anything that happened before they were born. That’s not the case. People my age and younger seek out older art/media all the time. Even those who don’t will understand events and individuals of historical significance. A portion of Colbert’s viewers were likely educated on Sullivan’s importance to TV history tonight. Through that new knowledge, they could feel the significance of what was unfolding onscreen, even if they didn’t know Sullivan beforehand. Your weird obsession with arbitrary generational distinctions furthers illustrates how detached from reality you are. I’m sorry you lack the intellectual curiosity to learn about things before you were born. It makes life a much richer experience.

There is something almost Baudrillardian about trying to get sentimental by mentioning Paul McCartney and Ed Sullivan in Stephen Colbert's sendoff. It's not just that Paul McCartney is in his 80s. You have to be 40 to know who Ed Sullivan was (because you watched Forrest Gump as a kid), and you need to be 65 for his name to tug on your heartstrings. Hell, you've got to be 37 to get sentimental about Stephen Colbert because you remember him in the before times. And yet, a lot of people live in a hyperreality where this an intergenerational bonding moment. It's going to inspire everyone, young and old, to go back to Woodstock for old times' sake. A lot has been (correctly) said about my Millennial peer group's unwillingness to grow up, often shelling over tens of thousands of dollars to the Disney corporation to keep childhood nostalgia going a little longer. How were Millennials supposed to have a chance when Corporate America spends millions to give Boomers the same sentimental nostalgia? Baudrillard's "hyperreality" is often analogized as two people simultaneously watching completely different movies on the same screen. I'm not even sure the author was consciously doing it, but the name "Ed Sullivan" is meant to evoke wholesome childhood nostalgia in 78-year-olds. Citizen Kane sorrowfully thinking about his sled as a symbol for the innocence of his childhood, in a moment of introspection and regret before dying. Nobody who unironically watched Colbert is watching that movie. Some people are watching Eat, Pray, Love or an Anthony Bourdain documentary. The happy movie that resolves with the Boomers happily sustaining childhood nostalgia into old age. But everyone under 50 is watching Soylent Green. A movie that starts with the TV advertising the product that allows the decadence to continue, but resolves in a climax, where it's revealed that the (literally) human cost of decadence has simply been transferred to others.

@CartoonsHateHer Why would Zany insult me by calling me “annoying,” when I would NEVER call him "short and fat?" Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend - and maybe someday that will happen!

The one thing my critics and I can agree on: I am very annoying.

@CartoonsHateHer I always thought the left panel was Dakota Johnson/50 Shades coded (fitting the “kinky” premise). I also think it’s funny he says you “act like your audience is primarily female” even though I’ve seen like 80 different tweets where you say “I know my audience is mostly men.”

This person is not a fan of mine, but that's okay, this is a funny tweet. I didn't intentionally draw us in the comic and we have had nary a single threesome! But it's not the first time I've heard this lol

@johnwcbragg @IANdrewDiceClay WWF publicly announced they were scripted entertainment in 1989, three years prior. The general public knew it for decades before that.

@IANdrewDiceClay 1. this was before the end of kayfabe. they were still pretending it was real. 2. The pulled punches were embarrassingly obvious. it looked awful back then

I saw some of the reviews from "real" journalists from 1992 regarding SummerSlam 92, and some just make zero sense. Stuff like "you could see from the first punches that it was pantomime." Like did they expect the Bushwhackers to suddenly start throwing shoot headbutts?