“That was first-rate puppets,” Colbert said.
Colbert explained that members of his staff, including “Triumph the Insult Comic Dog,” a puppet with the voice of comedian Robert Smigel, went to film a comedy segment tied to January 6 audiences for two days last week. in the offices of Congress in front of the Capitol.
The host said the staff went through the security clearance and was invited to the offices of the representatives they were interviewing, which is important to note as Triumph “works with Dracula’s rules,” according to Colbert . On the second day of filming, personnel were detained by U.S. Capitol police.
“Which isn’t really surprising. The Capitol police are a lot more cautious than, say, 18 months ago, and for a very good reason,” Colbert said. “If you don’t know the reason, I know what news network you’re looking at.”
On Friday, U.S. Capitol police said in a statement that officers “observed seven people, unaccompanied and undocumented by Congress, in a sixth-floor hallway” in the Longworth House office building on the Capitol Hill.
Capitol police added that these people were accused of illegal entry. CBS said in a statement Friday that its production team’s interviews with members of Congress had been “previously authorized and arranged.”
Colbert went on to say Monday that U.S. Capitol police were only doing their job as their staff, and that everyone was “very professional” and “very quiet.”
“A pretty simple story until the next night, when a couple of people on TV started claiming that my puppet team had‘ committed an insurrection in the U.S. Capitol building, ’” he said. “First of all … what? Second of all … eh?”
The host explained that there are big differences between an insurrection and what his staff did, which he described as “stupid with intent to mock.”
“It’s predictable why these TV speakers are talking like that on TV. They want to talk about something other than the Jan. 6 hearings about the actual seditious insurrection that caused the deaths of several people,” Colbert said. “But to make any equivalence between the mutineers who storm our Capitol to avoid counting the ballot papers and a toy dog smoking cigarettes is a shameful and grotesque insult to the memory of all who died.”
Colbert ended his account of the incident with a lesson in satirical history of “puppet illegality.”
“The Great Muppet Caper, the riots of the 1980’s … How do you think the king came to power on Friday in the neighborhood of the imagination?” He said. “In this case, our puppet was just a puppet doing puppet stuff, and sadly, it’s changed so much in Washington that the Capitol police have to stay on high alert at all times because of the “January 6 attack. And as the hearings are becoming clearer, the real culprit is Putin’s puppetry.”
– CNN’s Oliver Darcy contributed to this report.