Stephen Colbert makes a Star Wars joke and talks about health care

When Stephen Colbert’s first joke is a Star Wars reference, you know it’s going to be a good night, even before he shows some footage.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert uses a lot of jokes with the word and. What we mean is that he’ll introduce someone by their formal title or position, and then carry on to crack a joke about them by usually saying “and (person) who (funny thing)”. It’s a pretty simple formula, and we don’t usually discuss them because they’re usually not the best material in Stephen Colbert’s monologue.

Then came last night’s episode. When Admiral Ackbar (he of “It’s a trap!” and many memes since memes became a thing on the Internet) gets a namecheck less than a minute into the eight-minute clip, it’s time to pay attention.

Check out the full clip below, with a couple of slightly risqué jokes:

In case you missed them, here are the other two:

• Senator Dean Heller (Republican from Nevada) is a “man looking at the photographer’s belt buckle”. As Colbert notes, Heller currently will not vote for the Senate’s health care bill, despite a group running ads against him in Nevada because of his refusal to support the bill. (They did, however, stop running the ads the same day, according to Politico.)
• Paul Ryan, meanwhile, who is the Speaker of the House, is a “cyborg learning to smile,” since sometimes taking a picture is hard.

Notably, Colbert focused quite a bit on Medicaid, citing two different sources — the ever-popular Washington Post as well as Bloomberg News — to explain the program’s huge impact. The Huffington Post, meanwhile, did a roundup of health care associations and academies that don’t support the bill now that the American Medical Association has joined the list.

Next: Colbert's return to The Late Show

The Late Show will once again have a new episode tonight.