It might be a slow December Friday night in America but Stephen Colbert had a cute gag to get the weekend started, reimagining the beloved (and heavily memed) keyboard cat as a QAnon conspiracy theorist secretly controlled by Mark Zuckerberg.
The joke was inspired by a New York Times report earlier this week about people who spread deliberate misinformation and use pictures of famous adorable memes in order to lure otherwise unsuspecting internet users in.
“The posts with the animals do not directly spread false information. But they can draw a huge audience that can be redirected to a publication or site spreading false information about election fraud, unproven coronavirus cures and other baseless conspiracy theories entirely unrelated to the videos. Sometimes, following a feed of cute animals on Facebook unknowingly signs users up as subscribers to misleading posts from the same publisher,” the article said in part.
So per usual, after setting the gag up with a supercut of TV news reports on the topic, the Friday night episodes cold open began properly with a title card that said “The Late Show has found a chilling example of misinformation.
And it’s pretty simple. Colbert repurposed the original Keyboard Cat video, but with added song lyrics talking about several dumb (but no less dangerous) conspiracy theories. They are:
“The vaccine will make you magnetized/spoons will stick to both your chest and eyes/Oprah runs the illuminati/Biden’s bones are manicotti/JFK Junior will soon arise/the earth is flat just like a pizza pie/I, the cat, wrote all of these words/Definitely not Mark Zuckerberg.
Watch the whole thing here now:
That was pretty bleak, so if you need to clear your mind, here’s the 2007 original Keyboard Cat video to cheer you up.