As the clock approaches 1 a.m. on the East Coast Wednesday night, John Oliver came out swinging during Stephen Colbert’s post-DNC live show. And he didn’t want to talk about Joe Biden or Barack Obama. No, Oliver is “all about Tim Kaine.”
“Where are my Kaineiacs in the audience?” he asked to tepid applause. “If he’s going to be America’s stepdad, that was an exemplary performance. The level of dad jokes and impressions that came out of that man’s soft face. He is a tall glass of lactate.
“His Donald Trump impression doesn’t just not sound like Donald Trump,” Oliver added. “I don’t think it sounds like anybody.” He said he’s never “wanted to be called ‘scamp’” by anyone as much as he did by Kaine tonight.
“He’s the cool stepdad,” Colbert offered.
“He’s as cool as could possibly be,” Oliver joked. “I have never saw anyone more about to break into a harmonica solo than that man.”
The two late-night hosts also touched on last week’s Republican National Convention, with Oliver saying he thinks he “needed Tim Kaine so badly” because he spent so much time watching the GOP the week before. “I just needed a break from everything,” he said. “This has been just 18 months of hell, and I needed Stepdad to come in and tell me it was going to be OK.”
“What was interesting to me was that this week from the Democrats,” Colbert said, “they did the thing that you always do in a political convention, that the Republicans forgot to do, which is to say, ‘Great country. It’s going to be greater.’”
“It’s an incredible thing to forget to say for four days,” Oliver said to laughs from the audience. “To get to the end of four days and go, ‘We definitely said we loved America, right? Check the tape. We must have said it. We say it all the time. Why would we not have said it?’”