For the second time in the span of a single week, a prominent late night talk show host has compared the presidential campaign announcement video of former Vice President Joe Biden to a reverse mortgage commercial.
On the heels of a similar joke told late last week in one of comedian Jimmy Fallon’s opening monologues on NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” a very similar joke reappeared during this past Monday’s edition of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on CBS.
First showing a clip from Biden’s campaign announcement video in which the former vice president reiterates an oft-quoted passage from the Declaration of Independence, Colbert drew the comparison immediately afterwards.
“That is inspiring,” Colbert said. “It makes you want to stand up for American values, and maybe buy a reverse mortgage. It seems like a reverse ad, I’m not sure.”
Colbert then showed another clip, where Biden refers to chanting by white supremacist demonstrators at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. as similar to chants, “heard across Europe in the thirties.” The comedian then made another joke built on his reverse mortgage comparison.
“Biden is appealing to his core demo: people alive in the 1930s,” Colbert said.
The reappearance of a similar joke on national television could reinforce the idea that there is a great deal of recognizability for reverse mortgage industry television advertising. While Fallon and Colbert are typically competitors in the arena of late night talk show dominance, they found themselves in rare form by being on the same proverbial page this time.
Watch the full segment at The Late Show’s YouTube channel.
