With Trevor Noah announcing his departure from “The Daily Show,” the question on everyone’s mind is: Which unfunny liberal “comedian” few will watch will take his place?

Late-night TV “comedy” has become entirely political, and politics, of course, only comes from one direction: the left.

It really weighed on the ratings. As The Post reported last week, “At its height, in 2013, with [Jon] Stewart at the helm, “The Daily Show” averaged 2.5 million viewers nightly. During Noah’s tenure, it initially averaged just north of 800,000 nightly viewers – but has since lost some of its viewership and occasionally dipped below 400,000.”

Stewart was also outspoken on the left, but he succeeded by treating the show as a comic education for uninformed voters. It’s not a dig. In 2004, a Pew Research Center poll found that 21 percent of adults under 30 regularly received presidential campaign information from television comedy shows such as “The Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live.”

With the election of Donald Trump and the obsessive discussions about him by celebrities at award shows, influencers on TikTok and random strangers on the subway, it has become much less important for a TV show to give news to children.

In October 2020, the New York Times accused Trump of having “ruined political comedy”. The play acknowledged: “Maybe it’s the glut; in any form of humor, from sitcoms to bar remarks, overproduction causes problems. Yes, the boring, boring, uninspiring comedians of late night TV were and continue to be obsessed with Donald Trump, and that’s what actually destroyed their shows.

Last Wednesday, to pick a day at random, Jimmy Kimmel, fresh off trending on Twitter after being so awkwardly unfunny on a “Monday Night Football” segment, joked that he hoped Trump’s ranking on the Forbes richest list would also be his inmate number. .

Jimmy Fallon, who in 2016 made the mistake of treating Trump like a regular guest by ruffling his hair, a move for which he tearfully apologized, joked that maybe Trump should help Ukraine since he had so many affairs with strangers.

Stephen Colbert called Trump a “horny cockatoo” in a joke you really don’t need to hear because, like all of Colbert’s attempts at humor, it’s just not funny.

Trump was a joke when he was president, okay, but it’s the fall of 2022. Trump hasn’t been president in almost two years, and he’s the best of those ideological recruits.

It’s not hard to see that these comedians are in these niches less for their, ahem, comedy and more for their inside-the-line politics. Kimmel and Colbert have a fairly open seething anger towards anyone not left with them. And Fallon, while noticeably kinder and not as hateful to half the country, seems to live in fear of another pile-up for treating a political opponent like a human. He won’t make that mistake again.

And while the media talks about how sad it is that the only non-white late-night host is leaving, Noah hasn’t strayed from that boring liberal orthodoxy at all.

That’s part of why Greg Gutfeld’s late-night show on Fox News was such a hit. As the only non-liberal late-night comedy show, “Gutfeld! has broader automatic appeal than the same Jimmy-Jimmy-Stephen shows on network TV. It averaged 2.19 million viewers in August.

Gutfeld also happens to be really funny, and his co-hosts Kat Timpf and Tyrus are also hilarious. They don’t make lame jokes about Trump or the guy who is president at the moment. They are not predictable like the rest of the late night lineup.

It’s also why Joe Rogan continues to crush the podcasting world. Comedian, Rogan is an open liberal. But he doesn’t make the same silly Donald Trump jokes. Nor are its guests uniformly left-leaning like those on late-night shows. It turns out that diversity matters.

Something is going on here, but the TV producers don’t seem to want to know about it. The producers of these shows have a point of view, and they want that point of view to be pushed, even if it means turning off half the country and not laughing at all.

No one expects late night shows to be balanced or smart. But can they at least sometimes be funny?

Twitter: @karol