Do late-night TV comedians like Colbert, Noah, Myers and Bee serve significant social and political purpose other than pure entertainment?

I find the humor therapeutic. It is also helpful in keeping up with all this nonsense.

I remember when Colbert had his parodical “extreme right winger” persona.
Feels like a moderate now.

For me, they are an important “mental health” distraction. After making it through a day of utter madness, their jokes give me a way to release some of my fear!!! Even the things they say that I don’t agree with, gives me some release!!! Then I go to sleep & wake up to do it all over again the next day!!!

They are awful corporate mouthpieces who are partly responsible for Trump and everything that has followed.

They wouldn’t even have a job IF trump kept his mouthpiece closed!!!

For a significant proportion of our citizens late night monologues are the preferred source for news on current events.

I find it a sad commentary that anyone should depend on any of those dolts for news.

While class clowns can be intelligent, their opinions are useless.
Besides that, Writer’s come up with most of the material, and what do we actually know about any of them?

I haven’t watched Colbert for a while, but the few times I have, he seems to me (if you get his actual perspective) to be far more appropriate and reasonable a reaction than the mainstream news. He has long said what should have been said about Trump, and pointed it out with video examples: that Trump is incoherent and terrible and should have been laughed out of the elections, let alone never have been taken seriously as a candidate or elected, or not thrown out of office shortly after being elected, for absolutely preposterous and utterly unacceptable behavior. His observations are to me, very accurate, and show how ridiculously outrageously incompetent our news media, voters, and other politicians are for not ejecting that vile excuse for an adult the heck away from elected audience.

So yeah, if no one else is going to say it, definitely it’s valuable that comedians are saying it.

Same goes for a lot of adult comedy shows, notably even cartoon comedy shows, where the humor and cartoon format allow them to make needed true comments on otherwise-tabboo subjects.

I tend to avoid a lot of TV though, or at least their names, so I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen enough of “Noah, Myers, or Bee” to accurately comment on them or even be sure who they are.

I would say though that John Oliver definitely falls into the camp I was talking about, though – his comedy version, though sometimes overstated and evoking some backlash reactions from conservatives, seems to more often than not express the sorts of opinions that I tend to have and/or wish were the opinions and messages of what I would think would simply be objective news reporting.

That’s how messed up I think our corporate news media is, that it doesn’t express the same basic reactions to things.

What makes them any worse than the talking heads on cable news? I’d rather get news with a humorous edge than have some loudmouth spewing bile. Just because it’s comedic doesn’t mean it’s untrue. It’s also news commentary, not reporting, so it’s not a substitute for journalism.

To be fair, I don’t watch any of them and I don’t get my news from them (I would watch Jon Stewart in high school sometimes and that’s about it). But I’m not ready to denounce them as a whole.