John Oliver and Stephen Colbert discussed the presidential election at an event aptly-named, "Wow, That Was Weird," at the Montclair Film Festival on Saturday night.
The event, which was scheduled and planned long before election day, ended up being more of a "group-therapy session" than a true comedy show, the New York Times said. In fact, they had to scrap all of their material after Donald Trump was declared the winner.
"We had guests and pre-taped pieces for one of three eventualities," Colbert said. "Hillary Clinton wins and we know; Hillary Clinton wins and we don't know, because it's not called until the show's over; or Donald Trump wins and we don't know, because he has such a narrow path to victory."
What they didn't anticipate: Trump's decisive electoral college victory.
"We have two-and-a-half shows worth of material that you'll probably never see," he said. "We had all these made-up commercials, but none of them were appropriate once we went on the air."
So, instead, the two funny men had a heart-to-heart talk about their election experiences and how they were feeling.
Of his live, election night special on Showtime, Colbert said, "That was the hardest thing I've ever done," adding that, "The audience was sobbing openly.
Oliver discussed the risks associated with normalising Trump's presidency. "I think the danger of 'live your lives, the sun comes out tomorrow' is that that's true for some people, and so it's very easy to forget that it's very much not for others," he said. "That's the danger. If you are lucky enough for your life to become routine, it's easy not to feel the pain of others whose routines are going to be shattered. Not everyone is going to be okay, so it's incumbent on everyone to remember that."
And lest you think that Colbert and Oliver are excited at the plethora of comedic material Trump may be sending their way, Colbert corrected that assumption. ""Next person who says to me, 'You must be happy on a certain level' is going to get their eye carved out," he said.
Colbert also noted the problem of "fake news" that plagued Facebook in the months prior to the election and took issue with the misnomer. "What we did [on] was fake news. We got on TV and said 'This is all going to be fake. We're making fun of news,'" he said. "The fact that they call this fake news upsets me because this is just lying."
