On Tuesday night, Seth Meyers offered viewers the “Late Night Democratic Presidential Debate” as a way to make up for the important questions he felt went unanswered during the third Democratic debate last week.
What he was really offering, of course, was a chance for his staff to show their video-editing savvy. The five-minute gag saw the candidates’ original answers to debate questions taken out of context and edited in as the punchlines to “moderator” Meyers’ jokes.
“Mr. Yang, how is your relationship with your wife?” asked the late night host.
“We’ve been in a state of continuous armed conflict for 18 years,” the entrepreneur answered, though in real life he was referring to a question about pulling troops from Afghanistan.
From declaring TJMaxx a federal disaster site to getting advice from the politicians on how to spice things up in the bedroom, Meyers set up a variety of nonsensical jokes that relied on answers from former vice president Joe Biden, Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and others to land.
As for the real debate last week, ten of the Democratic presidential candidates shared a stage at Texas Southern University in Houston. Moderators pressed candidates on questions ranging from health care, gun control, immigration, education and foreign policy.
ABC and Univision’s joint effort averaged 14 million total viewers, according to Nielsen. That was more than CNN got back in July, but less than the NBCUniversal simulcast did in June. Among adults 25-54, which is the key demographic for news programming, ABC and Univision combined for 4 million viewers.