MSNBC host Rachel Maddow had the nation’s attention Tuesday night when she tweeted that she had President Donald Trump’s tax returns. When people tuned into The Rachel Maddow Show that night, however, many were underwhelmed. Maddow only had two pages of Trump’s 2005 tax returns, and devoted her show’s lengthy first segment to explaining the context surrounding the returns without actually revealing their contents.

Late Show host Stephen Colbert had a field day skewering Maddow on his show Wednesday, delivering a pitch-perfect parody of Maddow’s slow reveal, and even donning a slim navy blazer and ditching his glasses to match the MSNBC host’s signature look.


“I hold in my hand something very significant,” Colbert said, lifting up a piece of paper just like Maddow did. “It is a joke — a joke that we have confirmed has been heard by Donald Trump.”

Colbert went on to reveal the first part of the joke, which turned out to be one of the most well-known jokes in America.

“Why did the chicken —” Colbert began, before pausing. “But first, a word on chickens.”

From there, Colbert teased out the joke in agonizingly slow detail, veering off into sidebars about the history of chickens, roads, and whether either of them had connections to Russia.

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” Colbert repeated a couple of minutes later, before pausing to shuffle his papers and stare at the camera. “The answer — right after the break.”

Maddow defended the work she and her team did on the tax returns story to the Associated Press and during an appearance on The Tonight Show Wednesday night.

“I think people are really concerned to see what’s in those tax returns,” Maddow told Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon. “And so, when we found out that we had one, it was like speaking to a group of people dying of thirst in the desert. And we were like, ‘Behold, we have found a drop!'”