The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng became the first late-night host to joke about the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
During Thursday (December 5) night’s edition of the Comedy Central talk show, guest host Chieng, 39, addressed “the story that everyone is talking about.”
“A manhunt continues for a man accused of carrying out a targeted hit on a health insurance CEO, and investigators have been finding clues in surprising places,” he said, going on to show a compilation of different news segments discussing the words “deny, defend and depose” carved into the bullets used to kill Thompson.
In one CNN broadcast, an expert spoke about the difficulty and detail it must have taken for the killer to inscribe the chilling message onto the live ammunition.
“Would you train a mouse to write on it with some kind of mouse crayon? I mean, who gives a f*** how he wrote it! It’s not important how he wrote it. What’s important is that he wrote it. This guy knows that there are so many bullet casings on the streets of New York and he wanted to make sure we knew which ones were his,” Chieng quipped.
“Yeah, I don’t know if we should be applauding that,” he acknowledged. “And now they’re trying to interpret what ‘deny, defend and depose’ means and it looks like it’s either a criticism of the health insurance industry or this guy was just trying to solve the Wordle on his bullets.
“Honestly, I think all bullets should probably say stuff on them. I mean how else are we going to get Americans to read again, right? We should load up a machine gun with A Tale of Two Cities written in it,” he joked.
“But now, the cops just need to narrow down their list of suspects to anyone in America who hates their health-care plan and has access to guns,” he added sarcastically. “Should be solved in no time.”
Chieng went on to talk about another element of the investigation — police have discovered the killer visited a nearby Starbucks just before the shooting.
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“You stopped at Starbucks on the way to your assassination, like ‘You know me, I can’t even think about murdering until I’ve had my coffee,’” the host mocked. “This is helpful though, because the guy went to a Starbucks. So we now know he’s either a tourist or a local who really needed to take a s***.”
While many on social media too have taken a light-hearted tone to Thompson’s death, others condemned Chieng’s sketch.
“A little too soon for jokes,” one tweeted, with a second calling it “not funny.”
“When does the funny part start? Now they spend their time joking about people getting murdered? This is a strange show,” a third added.
Thompson, 50, was a Minnesota resident and father of two, who was visiting New York City for his company’s annual investor conference. He was gunned down at point-blank range Wednesday (December 4) morning outside the New York Hilton Midtown on 6th Avenue in what police are calling a “targeted attack.”
Authorities have yet to release a name or a clear picture of the suspect’s face; however, images from surveillance footage show the suspect to be a man wearing all black, with a black face mask, black and white sneakers and carrying a gray backpack.