Going from last week’s chaotic presidential debate to Wednesday night’s relatively mild vice-presidential contest was, ABC host Jimmy Kimmel said afterward, “like falling a sleep during a UFC fight and waking up during ‘The Great British Baking Show.'”
“It was vice thrilling,” said CBS’s Stephen Colbert. “I spent the whole debate on the middle of my seat.”
It wasn’t quite that tame, the showdown over administration competence and past political records between Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic challenger Sen. Kamala Harris. But watching the late-night shows try to handle it you could feel them working harder for their material than the week before.
Much of it came from Pence’s bland affect or, as Kimmel called him, “the human equivalent of unseasoned potato salad.”
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“Mike Pence loves to say ‘fracking,'” added Kimmel, referring to the debate’s talk of energy policy, “because it’s the closest he is allowed to get to using a curse word.”
“When he heard the debate was in Salt Lake City,” Jimmy Fallon said on NBC, “Mike Pence was like, ‘Ah, yeah. Sin City!'”
Watching President Trump talk all over rival Joe Biden last week felt like a view of the banality of evil, said Colbert. Then: “Tonight, on the other hand, we were faced with the banality of banality.”
Referring to the pre-debate disagreement between the campaigns over whether there would be COVID-19-protective plexiglas dividers on the stage, NBC’s Seth Meyers went into Pence voice: “If there’s going to be any flat transparent divider on that stage, it’s gonna be me.”
To Fallon, the whole event was simply “The thrilla with vanilla.”
The NBC hosts, though, were not live after the event. Only Colbert and Kimmel offered actual reactions to what transpired on the stage.
That said, Fallon’s “Tonight Show” had what was probably the funniest run of jokes, and they were based on a photo of the stage with the candidates’ two desks and the see-through wall portions between them.
“That’s not a debate stage,” Fallon said. “That looks like two bank tellers feuding with each other. That looks like the exit of a Barnes and Noble. I’m sure its safe because if there’s one thing we know about virus particles, it’s that they always travel in a straight line.”
Kimmel saw those barriers and went straight for the Donald Trump downfall scenario. “Having a conversation through a glass partition was good practice for Mike Pence,” he said. “After January that’s how he’s gonna have to do it when he visits his former boss at the correctional facility.”
“I’ve seen better sneeze guards at the Sizzler salad bar,” said Colbert.
With the protective barriers there at Harris’s insistence, because her rival had recently attended White House events where COVID-19 apparently spread among guests, the pandemic seemed likely to be a major topic of the night.
But although it was the first topic, it didn’t dominate the debate or the joke-telling.
Colbert, as usual, did the most jokes and the ones most analytical of the event. And he got deepest into the virus that has now infected many in the White House inner circle, including the president who downplayed its seriousness and is now being treated with a steroid that can have profound psychoactive side effects.
Colbert, for instance, called an opening line of Pence’s — “From the very first day, President Donald Trump has put the health of America first” — “something of a whopper.”
“And by ‘first day,'” he said in Pence voice, “I mean, the first day he tested positive. And by ‘put the health of America first,’ I mean, riding the dexamethasone pony straight into the maelstrom of Ragnarok.”
Kimmel, meanwhile, went for a vein. He said the Pence campaign was at first against the stage dividers because “Mike Pence believed that if you’re going to separate a man and a woman, it should be from their children at the border of the United States.”
For both hosts, shooting their shows after the debate meant they were able to talk about the social media star of the evening, the uninvited third participant, the fly that stayed atop Pence’s hair for more than two minutes as he talked about, well, something that was not as interesting as the insect.
“Technically, that fly is now his running mate,” Kimmel said.
“Thoughts and prayers to that fly’s family,” said Colbert. “It’s gotta quarantine for two weeks now. We’ve got to get that fly to Walter Reed.”
And two minutes, he noted wistfully, is a huge chunk of a fly’s life: “It made a life there. It joined Soul Cycle. It mixed at the bars. It changed its voter registration to ‘Mike Pence’s head.'”
Colbert also observed, as many viewers did, Pence’s unwillingness to obey the time limits, “no matter how many times (moderator) Susan Page politely asked him to. Susan, if you want to make Mike Pence shut up, you have to ask him to say, ‘Black lives matter.'”
The topic of race during the debate brought things back to the fly. “Mike Pence tonight denied that President Trump is a white supremacist by pointing this out,” Colber said, rolling the clip of Pence noting that the president has Jewish grandchildren.
This nudged “The Late Show” host back into Pence’s voice: “And furthermore, Susan, I want to point out that I have a black friend, by which I mean, this fly on my head.”
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