HBO host John Oliver ripped Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) on Sunday night for his “pathetic” attempt to mock Attorney General William Barr for not showing up for a hearing on Capitol Hill by bringing a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Oliver on “Last Week Tonight” sarcastically referred to the stunt as an “exhilarating bit of prop comedy.”
After he played a clip of Cohen saying “the message is that Bill Barr is a chicken,” Oliver responded: “Yeah, we get it. You’ve made that painfully obvious.”
{mosads}“And it actually gets even more pathetic because the hearing was at 9:30 a.m. and the nearest KFC apparently didn’t open until 10:30 a.m., and Cohen later admitted he bought the chicken the night before and kept it in his fridge,” Oliver added.
Oliver called the display “tragic for so many reasons.”
“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 f—ing awesome his chicken joke was going to be — and he was completely wrong about that,” Oliver joked.
Cohen acknowledged that he bought the chicken the night before last week’s scheduled House Judiciary Committee hearing, saying during an interview on MSNBC Sunday that eating the day-old chicken “wasn’t wonderful.”
Oliver also lambasted Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) for bringing a blown-up picture of Cohen eating the chicken to mock him.
“OK, I see,” Oliver quipped. “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.”