“The country has a lot of problems to solve. Tonight, we’ll solve none of them,” Stephen Colbert promised Saturday night—right before interviewing his fellow satirist John Oliver in front of a sold-out audience in Newark, New Jersey, during a benefit for the Montclair Film Festival, titled “Wow, That Was Weird: A Post-Election Evening with Stephen Colbert and John Oliver.”

He and Oliver kicked off the event with a fitting bit of symbolism. Throw pillows decorated each of their chairs: an American-flag pillow for Colbert, a British one for Oliver. The two waged a patriotic pillow fight, and when the dust settled, Colbert tossed his weapon to the floor between them. It landed with the American flag upside down, the signal for distress. They didn’t address it, but that moment of slapstick turned commentary seemed to perfectly reflect their task of doing comedy about—and for—a deeply divided country.

Oliver’s HBO series, Last Week Tonight, aired its post-election season finale a week ago. (The show returns for its fourth season February 12). In a half hour segment dedicated to Donald Trump’s victory, Oliver urged his viewers to remember that this election outcome was not normal. He elaborated on that theme Saturday:

“The danger of ‘Just live your lives, and the sun will come out tomorrow’ is, that’s true for some people, so it’s very easy to forget that it’s very much not for others. That’s the danger. If you’re lucky enough that your life can become routine, it’s easy to not to feel the hurt of those whose routine is going to be shattered,” he told Colbert.

“Not everyone is going to be O.K. So it’s incumbent upon all of us to remember that.”

Colbert agreed that Americans shouldn’t let their guard down now that Trump’s presidency is set in stone.

“I’m all for ‘Give him a chance,’ but don’t give him an inch. Because I believe everything he said, and it’s horrifying,” Colbert said. “Every president tries to achieve what they promised. . . . He owes the checks and balances of Washington nothing, because they tried to stop him. And he’s a vindictive person.”

Colbert and Oliver agreed that the Trump campaign wasn’t good for comedy, despite what fans may have assumed. Oliver said that this election actually gave his writing staff less material to work with than a typical race would.

“It’s an inverse version of what we normally do. With a campaign, you try to take something of substance, and then put some sugar on it. But there was so little of substance this whole campaign, it was just like a diabetes-inducing amount of sugar, and your job kind of flips on its head. Because you’re just trying to find a way to inject substance into sugar,” he explained. “So much time we were spending just trying to think about framing devices. How to make something out of what felt like nothing.”

For Colbert’s Late Show, the challenge was to get beyond the single narrative of Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. Colbert said his show’s researchers looked for any other election issue they could latch onto, and came up empty.

Election Night itself was particularly difficult for Colbert. He moved The Late Show from CBS to Showtime for a live episode, which he called “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my professional life.”

“My audience was sobbing openly,” he said.

Colbert and his staff prepared material for every outcome they could reasonably expect that night: a clear Clinton win, a narrow Clinton lead, and a narrow Trump lead. They weren’t prepared for a Trump victory. Colbert said they were left with about 20 minutes worth of usable content.