Craft your best #jokes while you can; Comedy Central's two-time Emmy-winning late-night game show @midnight with Chris Hardwick is coming to a close this August The hashtag-friendly series will kick off its final week starting July 31st and, after four seasons and 600 episodes, will air its series finale on Friday, August 4th. The mutual decision to end the show was reached by Hardwick (who's the host as well as the executive producer), Comedy Central, and production company Funny Or Die.

Deadline reported the news just before the @midnight staff found out about the cancellation. Despite its name, the show enjoyed a ratings bump upon moving from a midnight time slot to one at 11:30pm, but viewership has remained consistent since then. There are currently no plans to launch a new show for the midnight slot, though the network's The President Show could be a suitable candidate if it survives past Labor Day.

Comedy Central president Kent Alterman had this to say about @midnight:

We took a big macro look and we started having conversations with Chris. We feel incredibly proud of the show, we think it’s had an amazing run. How many shows can say that they’d hit 600 episodes? It was a little bit of the audience telling us over time, and we mutually thought, ‘You know what, maybe we should walk away holding our heads high and proud, full of appreciation and gratitude’.

Hardwick, of course, weighed in as well:

@midnight has meant the world to me these last four years. It has been a dream to come to work 600 times to make inappropriate jokes about the Internet with my fellow comedian friends. I could not be more proud of this show, staff and crew and at the end of the day, I think we accomplished everything we wanted to accomplish. Spiritually it just feels like it ran its course — I’m not sure we had many more hashtag games in us (which may actually be a relief to anyone whose Twitter feed gets overrun every night).

 

I owe such a huge debt of gratitude to Comedy Central and Kent for taking a chance on the show, always being great partners and allowing us to exit mutually, which is rarely a gift you are given in this business. I will certainly miss awarding POINTS! to people nightly, so please understand if you see me randomly shouting it at strangers in public after August 4th.

While the concept of @midnight may live on in another iteration in the future, the current run is just about over. Be sure to leave your best #farewells in the comments for points!