Stephen Colbert’s first live show back in studio on Monday evening did not seem go as smoothly for the late night host as he might have hoped.
Guest Jon Stewart — formerly the host of The Daily Show and nobody’s idea of a conservative Republican — endorsed the COVID lab-leak theory and mocked those who so quickly dismissed former president Donald Trump and Senator Tom Cotton when they raised the possibility.
“There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania! What do you think happened? Like, ‘I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.’ Or, it’s the [expletive deleted] chocolate factory!” Stewart exclaimed in his famously exasperated tone.
Colbert was taken aback by Stewart’s position, facetiously asking him when he began working on Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson’s staff. Snarky commentary aside though, Colbert also speculated that “it could be possible that they have the lab in Wuhan to study the novel coronavirus diseases because in Wuhan, there are a lot of novel coronavirus diseases because of the bat population there.”
“I’m suspicious of the Daytona Beach Spring Break Herpes Lab” said Colbert.
Unfortunately for his hypothesis, the bats studied at the lab in question do not come from Wuhan, but instead reside in caves outside the city of Nanning in southern Asia, roughly 1,000 miles away from the city where the coronavirus pandemic began.