Club Congress

Trevor Noah calls out Boehner as the bouncer at Club Congress

By Nick Gass

Trevor Noah took the helm of "The Daily Show" on Monday night, delivering a fairly hefty dose of politics in his opening monologue but stopping short of critiquing media coverage like his predecessor.

In recapping the previous week that saw the visit of Pope Francis and the resignation of House Speaker John Boehner, Noah struck an earnest, even explanatory, tone.

"In quieter moments, His Holiness wanted to talk politics," Noah said during his monologue. "Hates inequality and climate change, loves immigrants. He's like a young Bernie Sanders," after playing clips of the pontiff speaking to American audiences last week.

For the record, Pope Francis is actually older than Sanders, at 78 years old to the Vermont senator's 74.

Moving to Boehner's resignation, Noah expressed frustration with the fact that the speaker is leaving just as he is arriving.

"I've got a fancy suit and a new set and I learned how to pronounce your name. Boehner," he said with a wink. "To understand why Boehner leaving is such a big deal, you have to understand what a big deal Boehner was."

Boehner is "basically the bouncer at Club Congress," Noah explained. "Which is probably the worst club ever, I mean. First of all, there's hardly any women in the club. There's always a bunch of old guys talking about laying pipe [with reference to the Keystone XL pipeline on screen], oh, and everyone at the club has aides," Noah said, to gasps, recycling a joke used on "South Park" in 2002. "Aides! The people that help you. You are disgusting."

"To lose a speaker as effective as Boehner must have been crushing for the Republicans. I mean, he helped enact budget cuts that for the first time in decades decreased federal spending for two years in a row. He made most of the Bush tax cuts permanent, and he deported Taco Tuesdays from the cafeteria menu," he joked.

He then made reference to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who drew loud applause when he told a crowd at last Friday's Values Voter Summit that Boehner was stepping away from the speakership.

"That is the face of a man who's not used to getting applause. Look at it. Look at his face. He's like, 'What are you doing with your hands? What is going on?'" Noah said, calling the annual convention "a gathering of some of the radical conservatives who shut down the government over Obamacare in 2013, and the same people who wanted to shut it down again over Planned Parenthood this very week. And for Boehner, this was the last straw."

"You see, for this faction, even John Boehner, the man once ranked the eighth-most conservative man in Congress, wasn't right-wing enough," Noah said. "It's like crack telling meth that it's not addictive enough."

The show then shifted to a correspondent segment, a Daily Show stand-by under Jon Stewart, in which it was joked that Boehner might pursue other lines of work, like "a professional onion slicer" or a "seat-filler at a funeral" or an impersonator of Claire Danes' expressive "Homeland" character, Carrie Mathison.