Presidential candidates squared off in the second Democratic debate on Tuesday night and late night comedy shows went live to discuss them.
Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” opened its live broadcast on Tuesday night with host Trevor Noah welcoming viewers with a segment titled, “Democratic Debate 2: 2 Fast 2 Furious 2 Many Candidates.”
“This was a truly important night for America, a night where the nation tuned in to watch one man emerge from a giant field of candidates and achieve a hard-fought victory,” Noah said. “That’s right, tonight was ‘The Bachelorette’ finale.”
Noah then broke down how CNN’s Democratic debate was structured and formatted, saying the broadcast began with an “endless stream of all of the Democratic candidates shaking hands with each other” and that it “took forever.”
“There are like 50 people on the stage,” Noah said. “And secondly because Marianne Williamson insisted on giving everyone a palm reading. She’s like, ‘spoiler alert, you’re not going to win, Hickenlooper.'”
Over on the live telecast of “The Late Show,” host Stephen Colbert kicked off Tuesday’s show saying that it was hard to sum up what happened at the debate.
“Most of it was a bunch of guys with no chance to win the Democratic nomination yelling Republican talking points at the people who can,” Colbert said. “It was like watching the seven dwarfs offering Snow White a poison apple.”
Colbert also showed a clip of Senator Bernie Sanders talking about how big companies like Amazon, that make billions of dollars, “did not pay one nickel” in federal income tax.
“And one nickel is a lot,” Colbert said, impersonating Sanders. “You can take a streetcar to the Ziegfeld and see a talkie… and still have enough left over for an egg cream at Woolworth’s.”
Jimmy Kimmel also got in on the fun during ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Tuesday night.
“At this point, now that the dust has cleared, it’s John Hickenlooper’s election to lose,” Kimmel joked. “This was some lineup. It was actually more a pileup than lineup.”
Kimmel remarked that Tuesday’s debate had more characters than the NBC drama “This Is Us” — even though it wasn’t even all of the candidates.
“It’s weird they don’t have a better process for thinning the herd,” Kimmel said. “Have 30 years of reality TV taught the Democrats nothing? You can’t go from 20 candidates right to one. First you have to put them on an island and separate them into tribes.”
