Gov. Cuomo, grinning, says boyfriend he claimed to ‘like’ is ‘no longer with us’

It might be the governor’s favorite use of social distancing yet.

As his face began to morph into a wide smile, Gov. Cuomo said Thursday that his daughter’s boyfriend, whom he claimed to “like” during an off-the-rails April news conference, is no longer present in his family’s life.

“Let’s just say the boyfriend is no longer with us,” the 62-year-old governor said gravely, before smiling and then cackling as he spoke with Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show.”

On April 19, Cuomo said his daughter Mariah’s boyfriend was “very nice” before launching into a sermon on parenting.

The boyfriend cliff is looking pretty steep. (Jeenah Moon/)

“Advice to fathers: The answer on what you think of the boyfriend is always ‘I like the boyfriend,’” Cuomo said. “Because there’s only two options. Either you like the boyfriend, in which case you say, ‘I like the boyfriend.’ Or you don’t like the boyfriend. But you can never say you don’t like the boyfriend.”

Opposition to the boyfriend creates “natural defiance syndrome,” Cuomo explained.

The rant became a coronavirus classic.

Maria DeCotis, a Brooklyn comedian, lip-synced audio from the remarks into a prop-filled viral video. (DeCotis, 28, said in the spring that she built the sketch on a simple premise: “There’s no way he could like the daughter’s boyfriend.”)

And Cuomo memorialized the moment on his pandemic poster over the summer, including a likeness of a young man hanging perilously from a rock face, the words “Boyfriend Cliff” floating in the stone.

In the episode of “The Late Show,” Colbert asked Cuomo, “Is the boyfriend still the boyfriend?”

The grinning governor’s response left Colbert laughing.

“Somebody should start dragging the lake,” Colbert said.

Cuomo, who has called himself the “love gov,” is single. But he said this week that he has a “couple of irons in the fire.”