AceShowbiz - During a Thursday night appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper elicited applause from the studio audience with a witty remark about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent use of a fabricated Bible verse inspired by the film Pulp Fiction.

Earlier that week, at a Pentagon worship service, Hegseth quoted a modified version of the Ezekiel 25:17 passage, famously recited by Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 crime comedy. This unusual choice quickly became fodder for jokes, including from Colbert during his Thursday monologue.

When Cooper joined Colbert later in the show, he couldn’t resist adding his own spin. “This administration says this is not a war, and yet they insisted on renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War,” Cooper quipped. “You know, Secretary Samuel L. Jackson calls himself the Secretary of War.” The audience immediately caught on and applauded the clever joke.

Following the laughter, Cooper addressed the administration’s contradictory stance on the conflict, noting, “They attack reporters who say that this is a war. So it’s an ‘excursion,’ as the president says, which I’m not sure if he actually means incursion, but I don’t know.”

Earlier in the same episode, Colbert asked Cooper if the current war in Iran felt different from previous U.S. engagements. Cooper echoed sentiments shared by his CNN colleague Clarissa Ward, expressing uncertainty about the goals of the conflict. “I’m not sure what the metric of success is,” he said. “People talk about the Fog of War. Rarely does that fog emanate from a giant machine at the White House that’s, like, blowing fog out.”

Cooper elaborated on the shifting explanations from the White House, citing the repeated changes in the rationale for the military action. “It was regime change for a while and then it was not regime change, and then the president is now saying, ‘Well, actually, there has been regime change because there’s new people sitting in the seats because the old ones were killed off,’” he explained.

The evening’s exchanges highlighted the ongoing confusion surrounding the administration’s messaging on the conflict, while also providing some levity through Cooper’s humorous nod to Pulp Fiction and its iconic dialogue.