On Sunday evening, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver dedicated the opening portion of his program to Attorney General William Barr’s no-show at a House Judiciary Committee hearing.
“On Thursday, Attorney General Bill Barr failed to turn up to a congressional hearing—and that prompted this exhilarating bit of prop comedy,” offered Oliver.
Yes, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) spent the hearing chowing down on a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. If that wasn’t enough, he also flaunted a ceramic chicken to send the message that AG Barr is—yep—“a chicken” for refusing to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Yeah, we get it. You’ve made that painfully obvious. And it gets even more pathetic,” explained Oliver. Because the Barr hearing was at 9:30 a.m., and because the nearest KFC didn’t open until 10:30 a.m., Cohen—as The Daily Beast reported—“bought the chicken the night before and kept it in his fridge.”
“Which is just tragic for so many reasons,” said Oliver. “One, he’s biting into leftover KFC—or, as it’s more commonly known, ‘trash.’ And two, that means this adult man probably lay in bed all night thinking about how fucking awesome his chicken joke was going to be—and he was completely wrong about that.”
Not to be outdone, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) proceeded to bring a blown-up photo of Cohen munching KFC to the Senate floor to argue that Cohen was being, well, unprofessional for doing so during a House committee hearing.
“I see,” said Oliver. “So it’s pathetic theater to eat KFC but not to rush to Kinkos and laminate a poster-board image of someone eating KFC. I get it.”
