The House of Representatives still doesn’t have a speaker after Kevin McCarthy has failed to win multiple votes for the leadership position, and late night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel are thrilled.
“No one, literally no one, and I called people who know things, no one knows what happens now,” Colbert said of the impasse in the Republican-led chamber, on CBS’ Late Show Wednesday night. “Here’s what we do know: It’s fantastic!”
Later, after a news clip was shown of McCarthy saying he wouldn’t withdraw from the race, Colbert said, “Oh Kevin, let it go. Don’t you know one of the things about dreams is sometimes they die? Except for my dream, where you keep losing over and over again!”
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He continued to quip, “Nobody pinch me. I don’t want to wake up, mom. I don’t want to go to school today.”
Over on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, Kimmel said, “I have to admit it’s fun to watch these animals stabbing each other in the back. It’s like House of Cards but everyone is Kevin Spacey.”
Indeed, both Colbert and Kimmel drew on film and TV analogies to illustrate McCarthy’s plight, with Colbert dubbing it “Sad-atar: The Way of Loser,” in a reference to hit movie Avatar: The Way of Water.
Colbert used the much-memed clip of Gene Wilder at the end of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (“You get nothing! You lose! Good day sir!”) as an “analyst who [accurately] captured Kevin McCarthy’s situation at the end of the day.”
He also aired news footage of McCarthy summing up the votes by saying, “Today, is it the day I wanted to have? No.”
“That’s a pretty mild way to assess the worst day of his political career,” Colbert said.
The show then spliced some of McCarthy’s dialogue onto a clip from Jaws of a man in a shark’s mouth.
Over on Kimmel, the host joked, “The last time a Kevin felt this abandoned in his house was in the movie Home Alone.”
He also touched on the Republicans’ approach to the Jan. 6 insurrection and results of the 2020 election.
“Who would have guessed that a bunch of insurrection apologists would have trouble certifying a vote,” Kimmel said. “I don’t know why he doesn’t just declare he won. Isn’t that how it works in that party?”
Kimmel and Seth Meyers brought Biden into the mix.
“The last time something like this happened was 100 years ago, and I’ll tell you something, Joe Biden solved it then and he can solve it again now,” Kimmel said.
Meanwhile, Meyers noted that Biden isn’t planning to intervene, “at least not until it stops being hilarious.”
He continued to take shots at McCarthy’s lack of support by joking, “You guys can’t even have a red wave amongst yourselves.”
Colbert, meanwhile, responded to Fox News’ Sean Hannity asking what Ronald Reagan “would say” about this standoff by launching into an impression of the former president awoken from the dead: “Ah, where am I? Everything was so dark for so long and then there were these demons chanting around me saying you should have addressed the AIDS crisis when you had the chance. And then I woke up all of a sudden. Mommy!”
The zaniness continued on NBC’s Tonight Show as host Jimmy Fallon played up the fact that until a speaker is elected, Congress can’t get to work, which he said means “no rules!”
Fallon then ran around the 30 Rockefeller Center building, drinking orange juice out of the carton, pretending to punch people and ripping the tag off of a mattress.
The late-night hosts weren’t the only ones joking about the multiple votes.
On Wednesday, Veep alum Julia Louis-Dreyfus took to Instagram to post a picture of McCarthy speaking to people on what looked like the House floor, with the caption, “If we don’t win an Emmy for this episode of @veephbo I’m leaving the TV Academy.”
The Veep writers David Mandel, Billy Kimball and Lew Morton also got in on the action. Showrunner Mandel tweeted a letter ostensibly written by the HBO political comedy’s most deplorable character, Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons), where the former congressman and impeached vice president pitches himself for speaker. “I am willing to make whatever concessions anyone wants so I can get this job, no matter how humiliating,” he says. Among his laundry list of reasons as to why he’s right for the job: “I saw Top Gun: Maverick 18 times in a theater” and “I have had COVID 17 times.”
And former Daily Show host Jon Stewart tweeted, “This is the best season of C-Span…ever.”
