I take two walks a day now, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, a habit I built somewhere in the second year of the pandemic and never gave up. The earbuds go in, the sanag pair that cost me almost nothing, and lately the thing keeping me company on the pavement is Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4, a panel doing impressions on Dead Ringers of British politicians I only half recognize, and I am laughing out loud on a public sidewalk in a way I have not laughed at anything American in a while. Scroll my library and the honest picture of where I have ended up is right there in a column. Laugh Out Loud from CBC. Because News from CBC. Breaking the News from BBC Radio Scotland. The Debaters. Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! Plus, and then the news, always the news, Marketplace and the Economist and The Daily stacked underneath the comedy like ballast. Somewhere back there my comedy shelf quietly emptied out and refilled with accents that were not mine.

The news never emptied. If anything it overflowed, a fresh disaster every morning before I finished my coffee, more than any of us asked for. What disappeared was the thing that used to sit beside the news and make it bearable, the laugh that let me set the whole mess down.

I still had Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! That one held. But the rest of my American rotation had started to feel like a green room where everyone was auditioning for the same job. I watch The Daily Show, and Kimmel, and Fallon, and I keep Real Time with Bill Maher in the library too, and on a generous night I will sit through a Gutfeld monologue, so this is not the complaint of a man who quit watching in a huff. It is the complaint of a man who watches all of it and still comes away hungry.

American comedy needs better PR. I do not mean the industry should hire a publicist. I mean the comedy itself has quietly become the PR. It runs as a kind of public relations for America, or worse, public relations for one half of America performing for the other half, each show telling its own audience they were right to feel exactly what they walked in feeling. The late-night monologue used to be a release valve. Somewhere along the way it turned into a mirror, held at the angle that flatters.

Then CBS ended The Late Show in May, retired the whole franchise after thirty-three years, and told us it was purely a financial decision. Maybe it was. It also happened while Paramount was chasing approval for a merger, and it happened to the loudest critic of the administration in the entire late-night lineup, and Colbert himself pointed out that not two years earlier the same network had wanted to sign him for five more. Something changed, he said, and he was too gracious to spell out what. Whatever you believe about the money, the outcome was the same. The most pointed voice on network television got switched off, and the lights over the Ed Sullivan Theater went dark for good.

I lost the smaller things too. Ask Me Another, the puzzle-and-music quiz that was pure silliness with nothing to grind, was already gone, and I miss it more than a show that lightweight has any business being missed. Car Talk is gone as well, Click and Clack laughing so hard at their own callers that the actual car problem became beside the point, and public radio has never quite replaced that particular joy. Bill Kurtis read his last regular Wait Wait in May after twelve years of lending dignity to a ham sandwich with that voice, and even though he stays on as an occasional fill-in and the show carries on with Alzo Slade, I felt the handoff. It was the sound of a particular kind of American humor getting quieter. The kind that laughs with you instead of at the other guy.

So on my two walks I go across the border and across the ocean now. I go to CBC for The Debaters and Laugh Out Loud and Because News, the Canadian rotation where comedians argue some absurd proposition to the death and nobody's career hangs on the outcome. I go to Breaking the News out of BBC Radio Scotland, and to the Friday night comedy on Radio 4 that has become the soundtrack to my afternoons. British and Scottish humor sits comfortably in the dark without needing to bolt a moral onto the end of it. It does not wrap the absurdity in an optimistic bow. It sets the human condition down in front of me, lets it be as bleak and ridiculous as it actually is, and trusts me to laugh without being told to.

The difference is not the accent, though the earbuds might suggest otherwise. It is that a public broadcaster is not chasing the same numbers, so it can afford to be weird, dry, and cynical. It does not have to be likable. American late-night has to be likable, has to be clippable, has to be scrubbed clean enough for the sponsor and sharp enough for the algorithm, and somewhere inside that arithmetic the actual joke gets optimized away.

And the news is broken. I keep circling back to that, because it is the whole point. The right answer to broken news is not more grave analysis delivered in a more serious tone. It is the nerve to laugh at the structural failure of the entire thing, which is exactly what public-media comedy in Canada and Britain still does and what ours has mostly forgotten how to do.

Which leaves me wondering whether we ought to have a comedy meter for countries. You can judge a nation by how much it can laugh at itself, and I mean at itself, not at its enemies. A country that can still find the punchline in its own policies has some perspective left in the tank. A country whose comedy has curdled into reassurance has lost the thread, and probably lost the ability to tell authority apart from truth.

For now I am out here on my afternoon walk, a panel in Edinburgh and a panel in Saskatchewan in my ears, taking apart a world that makes no more sense than mine, but with a far better sense of irony about it.

When your news cycle turns into a loop of bad updates, where do you go to laugh? Are you still in the American rotation, or have you found your way across the border and the ocean too? Tell me. I am collecting recommendations.