Jimmy Kimmel
Oscar nominations were announced on Tuesday morning, and though Avatar: The Way of Water received a nod for best picture, James Cameron was not nominated for best director. “Which is what you get for making us put on those dumb glasses for four hours,” Jimmy Kimmel joked on Tuesday evening.
Another nomination for best animated short went to a movie called My Year of Dicks, whose title cracked presenter Riz Ahmed up. “I’d never heard of the movie before,” Kimmel laughed. “I went to look up My Year of Dicks and now my computer won’t turn on.”
Kimmel then returned to the perennial late-night topic of late: classified documents found in various politicians’ private residences. This time, it was Mike Pence, who returned about a dozen classified documents found in his Indiana home to the FBI.
“Mike Pence has them too now!” Kimmel exclaimed. “This is unbelievable. It’s an epidemic.”
The Pence news was especially interesting, Kimmel noted, because the former vice-president was specifically asked about taking classified documents home in an ABC news interview from November. Asked if he kept any, Pence answered: “I did not.”
“Is that your final answer?” Kimmel said. “Because according to his lawyer, they discovered the documents in January” in “Mike’s kitchen, behind the Pence family mayonnaises”.
Of all the people, Donald Trump came to Pence’s defense, posting on Truth Social: “Mike Pence is an innocent man. He never did anything knowingly dishonest in his life. Leave him alone!!!”
“Unfortunately that post came two years and 18 days late,” Kimmel said. “When they were planning to hang him, he was like ‘you made your bed, I wish I could help.’”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert also addressed Pence’s classified documents. “Wow, that is tough news for Mike Pence, and fantastic news for Joe Biden,” he joked.
“Unlike Pence’s former boss, Pence wasn’t hoarding the documents,” Colbert added. The former VP said he took them home by accident, and they were found by one of his lawyers who Pence asked to search his home out of an “abundance of caution”.
“An ‘abundance of caution’ is why Mike Pence leaves the room when TV commercials come on,” Colbert quipped.
“So evidently, everybody in US government just has classified documents lying around their houses,” he continued. “This never used to happen. Previous veeps had methods to dispose of this kind of thing. Al Gore would immediately recycle documents, and Dick Cheney would shoot them in the face.
“I mean, to think Mike Pence’s legacy could be tarnished by one stupid mistake. Well, two stupid mistakes,” he said over a photo of Pence with Donald Trump.
Additionally, four more Oath Keepers were found guilty of seditious conspiracy for January 6 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. “They should be happy – they tried to break into a government facility, and now they get to live in one,” Colbert said.
The Daily Show
Those greedy, oily bastards must be getting nervous based on this commercial. @iamwandasykes pic.twitter.com/ILFxMorO1A
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) January 24, 2023
And on the Daily Show, guest host Wanda Sykes panned a television ad for oil and gas – not a particular company, just the concept of oil and gas. “Those greedy, oily bastards,” she said.
The ad, paid for by a group called Energy Transfer LP and run during a football game, ponders what would happen if oil and gas disappeared by having various objects – phones, clothing, hair color, a football about to be kicked on TV, the TV itself – turn to dust. “See this proves, y’all, that we’re doing something right, because they’re getting nervous,” said Sykes. “Because we’re buying electric cars, we’re switching to solar energy, and they’re like ‘but we also make footballs!’
“But you know what, I will agree with them on one thing: if there was no oil our world would be unrecognizable,” she added. “It would look like this,” she said next to a picture of a screensaver-green meadow. “What’s all that green shit at the bottom? Is that grass? I mean, I heard about it in history class, I don’t know.”
Sykes also noted that the household objects turning to dust resembled the Thanos snap in the Avengers. “So these guys are in the boardroom like, ‘we need to improve our image – we could be more like Thanos, right?’” she laughed.
