The ratings for Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report” were never all that great to begin with. Nonetheless, the ratings for Colbert’s replacement, Larry Wilmore, are a full 55% lower. While the left-wing Colbert struggles for his own ratings as David Letterman’s replacement on CBS, Wilmore did a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session and was walloped by Colbert’s fans:

 According to several commenters, Wilmore too often falls back on vapid pop culture commentary or race relations in America for his punchlines and segment focuses, abandoning the humorous-but-heartfelt championing of science and reason that was a recurring theme for The Daily Show’s Stewart and Wilmore’s predecessor, Colbert. …

These weren’t isolated opinions. More than 1,000 comments were posted in the AMA about this one clip—meaning more than a third of the entire AMA discussion was centered on this specific topic. A few defended the segment, noting that it gave Nye an opportunity to confront the nation’s widespread apathy toward scientific discovery, but most said Wilmore’s approach simply worsened the problem by reveling in disinterest rather than mocking it.

A defensive Wilmore, who was probably caught off guard outside The Bubble, responded by explaining what his show is about, which probably explains why it is an even bigger ratings disappoint than the “Colbert Report”: Wilmore wants to  “focus on race, class and gender.”

Asked why the Nightly Show “has done nothing but pander to the lowest common racial tensions denominator,” Wilmore explained that from Day 1 he and his writers wanted a different focus than The Colbert Report or Noah’s Daily Show.

“One of the missions of the show when we started was to be an answer to The Daily Show and focus on race, class and gender,” Wilmore wrote. “It’s really those three things, though it seems like a lot of talk on race. It’s one of the ways we were distinguishing ourselves from The Daily Show.”

The kind of criticisms leveled in Wilmore’s AMA could be key factors in the show’s decline in viewership since it replaced The Colbert Report in January 2015.

Wilmore has lost 29% of the audience his own show attracted just last year. And this is when the presidential election is all heated up.

Trevor Noah, Jon Stewart’s hand-picked replacement, has also bottomed out with a 30% drop.

The worst news for Noah and Wilmore (and the Left in general), is that neither man makes any kind of impact on the news cycle. Whereas the DC Media loved to aid and abet Democrats (specifically Obama) by viralizing Colbert and Stewart, you hardly ever see Noah or Wilmore aggregated in this way.

 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC