Shutdown politics are deeply exasperating. But they can also prove useful, as the melodrama reveals who the hacks are.

Yesterday afternoon, Nancy Pelosi said the following about funding the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the continuing resolution: “[The bill] is like giving you a bowl of doggy-doo, put a cherry on top and call it a chocolate sundae.” Obviously, Pelosi doesn’t object to anything in the continuing resolution; she objects to what’s not in it, which is a legislative fix for DACA. Her scatological metaphor stinks.

It’s hardly news that Pelosi was being dishonest. During shutdowns, politicians overplay their roles. It’s like watching the Duke and Dauphin from Huck Finn take a turn at serious drama: not art, but hard to expect anything better. Republicans made their fair share of slippery statements to justify shutting down the government in 2013, which Democrats are putting their own spin on. There is honor among professionals, even professional hacks.

But the biggest hack of all in this case is Jimmy Kimmel, the comedian-cum–public intellectual who last graced the polity with his insistence that the Graham-Cassidy health-care bill would have “kicked off” 30 million Americans from their insurance coverage. Hours after Pelosi’s press conference, Kimmel performed a sketch on his show called Barista Theater that was, essentially, a stolen bit. “Hello, I’d like a cappuccino, please,” Kimmel said to the barista. “Okay, great, that’s one cappuccino and one giant bag of horses***,” the barista replied. “But what if I just want the cappuccino?” Kimmel asked, and was met with this: “Whoa, buddy, you start making demands like that and I will shut down this entire coffee establishment.”

Leave aside that the sketch makes the same basic error as Pelosi’s, and leave aside that it’s the Democratic party that is threatening a shutdown. Kimmel’s political illiteracy (really, his writers’) should at this point be expected. His comedic hackery, however, is a new development. Not only is the joke dishonest and unfunny, it’s stolen — and in comedy, stealing bits is the worst kind of hackery there is. They’d be better off letting Pelosi tell her own jokes. She’s a professional, too.