Seth Meyers spent a few minutes Tuesday night going after the “truly strange tweets” Mike Bloomberg’s campaign posted containing fake quotes from Bernie Sanders praising real dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad. Bloomberg was ultimately forced to delete the tweets and explain that they were intended as “satire.”
The Late Night host began by informing Bloomberg that he’s simply “bad” at social media. “And that’s fine,” he said. “Nobody expects a 78-year-old billionaire to kill it on Twitter. The only thing a 78-year-old man is supposed to do on Twitter is mistake it for Google.”
Meyers went on to point out that if you have to explain that something is satire, “then you’re also bad at satire.” He used a clip of Bloomberg attempting to perform a Mary Poppins-inspired musical routine in 2007—“you know, when you were still a Republican”—to demonstrate why the candidate should avoid comedy altogether. “That performance was so bad, Dick Van Dyke saw it and endorsed Bernie,” he joked.
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“And yes, in general for all of you, it’s never a great plan to try and be the ‘funny’ candidate,” Meyers said, pointing to Hillary Clinton’s infamous “Pokemon Go to the polls” joke as a prime example. “Mike Bloomberg saw that and thought, ‘Well, I’ll never have her natural comic timing but maybe with practice I can get close.”
Instead of using “bad jokes” to get into the White House, the host said candidates should be focusing on “getting a bad joke out of the White House.”
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