A Curious Eye

Saturday Night Live used its opening sketch to lampoon Thursday’s vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan.

After a reminder from debate moderator Martha Raddatz (played by Kate McKinnon) that “your performance is extremely unlikely to affect the outcome of the election, so just have fun with it,” Joe Biden (Jason Sudeikis) and Paul Ryan (Taran Killam) took the stage. Sudeikis played up the image of the Vice President as aggressive and condescending, exclaiming a weary “Here we go!” as soon as Killam began speaking, and trumpeting his masculine bona fides: “When the Amtrak breaks down on my morning commute, I strip down to my tighty-whities—I push that bitch all the way to Washington.”