As the only late-night host to go live after the Jan. 6 committee’s first primetime hearing on Thursday, Stephen Colbert had the floor all to himself. And he began The Late Show by pushing back on the Republican predictions that the night would be “nothingburger.”
“They were wrong,” he said to cheers from his audience. “It was such a juicy burger that Fox News knew that even their viewers would be tempted to take a bite. Which is why—and this is true—for the hour of his show opposite the hearings, Tucker Carlson took no commercial breaks.”
“Do you understand what that means?” he asked. “Fox News is willing to lose money to keep their viewers from flipping over and accidentally learning information.” But the host said he wasn’t “surprised” because “that’s the first rule of any cult: never leave the compound.” The second rule? “Present your testicles to the tanning station.”
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On a somewhat more serious note, Colbert said that while “we’ve heard many of these details before,” it made his “heart well with gratitude to see the committee weave them together in a compelling case that Jan. 6 was not a spontaneous gathering of vape-fueled neo-knuckleheads that got out of control, it was, in fact, an attack premeditated by the president of the United States to prevent the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our nation’s history.”
From there, Colbert moved on to express how “shocked” he is that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) has become the “hero” of this story and shared one of the most damning clips from the hearing of Ivanka Trump admitting that her father lost the 2020 election.
“That must have been a bittersweet moment for the former president,” he said in response. “She finally screwed him.”
The jokes somehow only got more brutal from there, with Colbert explaining “how we got here” by saying, “It’s kind of complicated, but it all started at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, when a Black president made fun of a man with a very big ego and a very small penis.”
By the end of his live monologue, Colbert concluded, “After two hours of documentary evidence and testimony, we learned that this insurrectionist conspiracy was, like everything else associated with that administration, exactly what you thought, but worse than you could have imagined.”
“The next episode drops on Monday,” he said. “And to quote the former president, ‘Be there, will be wild.’”
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