Kimmel and Colbert, Joined in New York, Show a United Front

As Stephen Colbert strolled onto the stage of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” late Tuesday afternoon at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a couple of thousand fans jumped to their feet and bellowed a deafening chant of “Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!”

A couple of hours later, the roles were reversed: Mr. Kimmel headed for the guest chair at Mr. Colbert’s theater in Midtown Manhattan amid a standing ovation and chants of “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!”

The Tuesday editions of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on ABC and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on CBS were effectively a stunt, a crossover event across New York City that took advantage of the trip that Mr. Kimmel’s Los Angeles production takes to Brooklyn every year.

But the gimmick, in which each played the role of host and guest, had some added significance: It followed a chaotic two-month stretch with one permanent cancellation (Mr. Colbert) and one temporary cancellation (Mr. Kimmel) that set off a fierce national debate about free speech and the Trump’s administration’s repeated attacks on the media.

And the Tuesday editions of each late-night show underscored just how much the two hosts have demonstrated a united front through it all.

“My first guest tonight is an Emmy-winning late-night talk show host who, thanks to the Trump administration, is now available for a limited time only,” Mr. Kimmel said when he introduced Mr. Colbert on to his show.

The pair criticized the president directly on Tuesday, with Mr. Kimmel saying, “I hope we don’t ever have another president like this again.”

But much of their time together was spent discussing how they have gotten through the recent turmoil.

“Then I got to the sentence that actually told them what was happening, and they didn’t laugh,” he said.

Mr. Kimmel, when a guest on Mr. Colbert’s show, explained how ABC executives informed him about two weeks ago that his show was being taken off the air, in response to criticism of his comments about the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk.

The company told the public that his show was being suspended “indefinitely.” But Mr. Kimmel said he had figured that the show was finished.

“I thought that’s it. It’s over, it is over,” he said. “I was like, ‘I’m never coming back on the air.’”

But they were also speaking at a moment when an unforgiving economic landscape is putting all late-night shows in jeopardy.

After “The Late Show” goes off the air in May, CBS will abandon the late-night business. It is unclear what will happen after the contracts of Mr. Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon, on NBC, expire. Streaming executives have shown little appetite for programming late-night-type talk shows after years of poor results.

The numbers have been going in the wrong direction for some time. Mr. Colbert, the ratings leader among late-night hosts, once commanded a nightly audience of 3.1 million viewers. That is down to 1.9 million. Mr. Kimmel used to see nightly viewerships of 2.6 million. That’s now 1.6 million, according to Nielsen.

Mr. Colbert and Mr. Kimmel’s locking arms on Tuesday was representative of the in-the-trenches-together connection among the present — and perhaps last — generation of hosts.

They frequently appear on one another’s shows, and lavish praise on one another. (Seth Meyers of NBC popped up for a cameo on Mr. Kimmel’s show on Tuesday, too.) This summer, after Mr. Colbert’s cancellation was announced, Mr. Kimmel put up a giant Emmy “For Your Consideration” billboard at a busy intersection in West Hollywood, Calif., that read: “I’m Voting for Stephen.” One of the first things Mr. Kimmel did when he learned his show was being suspended, he said on his show on Tuesday, was fire off a text to a group chat with his fellow late-night hosts.

Mr. Kimmel has said he never believed Mr. Colbert’s show was losing money, even though CBS executives said it lost tens of millions a year. Over the summer, Mr. Kimmel told Variety that “there’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell that that’s anywhere near accurate.”

Strikingly, in that interview, Mr. Kimmel pointed to the fees that local stations pay to broadcast networks as a key reason he believed the number was wrong. (The short-lived boycott of Mr. Kimmel’s show by two large local station groups brought the relationship between broadcast networks and local affiliates to a public stage last week.)

Still, the hosts have acknowledged how much the late-night business is struggling. Jon Stewart recently likened hosting a contemporary late-night show to managing a Tower Records store. On Monday night, Mr. Colbert had Conan O’Brien, the former late-night host and current podcaster and Oscars host, on his show.

“Stephen, how’s late night?” Mr. O’Brien said as he sat down. “I’ve been out of it for a little bit — catch me up on what’s happening.”

“I’ll send you the obituary,” Mr. Colbert replied.

On Tuesday, Mr. Colbert showed a recording of his reaction to the news that Mr. Kimmel’s show was being removed from the air. He was sitting on his set at the time and, with a shocked look, backed up his host’s chair and kicked his legs on his desk.

“Wow,” he said in the recorded clip, which never made it to air previously. “Wow.”

Mr. Kimmel said he had learned of Mr. Colbert’s cancellation while at a “No Kings” demonstration, a protest against the Trump administration, with his family.

Both recounted whom they had heard from in the aftermath of receiving the bad news about their shows. Mr. Colbert said he had heard from a high school girlfriend, the “Game of Thrones” writer George R.R. Martin and James Taylor.

Mr. Kimmel revealed that he had also gotten a text from Mr. Taylor, speculating that the singer perhaps just copied-and-pasted from his text to Mr. Colbert.

As Mr. Kimmel was wrapping up his appearance on “The Late Show,” his longtime sidekick, Guillermo Rodriguez, came on to the set holding a bottle of tequila. He poured each a glass, and then Mr. Colbert made a toast.

“To good friends, great jobs,” he said, “and to late-night TV.”