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Now that was a debate. Though Twitter might not have been quite as eventful during Thursday night’s vice presidential debate as it was during the presidential debate, candidates Joe Biden and Paul Ryan seemed to bring just enough heat–and comedic relief–to keep the Internet on their toes. Here’s a quick recap.

Records weren’t broken

Not even coming close to the presidential debate’s record 10-million-plus tweets, tonight’s debate tweets peaked at 58,000 tweets per minute after Biden’s “Now you’re Jack Kennedy?” line, according to Twitter.

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Joe Biden clearly knows what GIFs are

The vice president’s consistent laughs, Cheshire cat grins, perplexed faces and interruptions became comical really quickly, almost as if he was intent on becoming the most GIF’d candidate of the evening’s debates. Some proof:


via Buzzfeed


via Huffington Post


via election.tumblr.com

And even more proof here.

He also knows what “malarkey” means

Twitter just couldn’t let it go after Biden called Ryan’s statements “malarkey,” which, for all of you non-good ol’ boys out there, means nonsense. Here’s how it went down:

http://www.youtube.com/v/zZhzLViXAIk?version=3&hl=en_US

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The Obama-Biden campaign even managed to jump on the “malarkey” bandwagon by purchasing the trending topic–as well as “Jack Kennedy,” “#vpdebate” and “Afghanistan in 2014”–which allowed their tweet-ad to float to the top of trending topic search results.

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More kneejerk accounts created

Though nothing quite reached Big Bird status, there were still plenty attempts at 10-second Twitter fame: @LaughingJBiden, @LaughinJoeBiden and @BidenSmirk. My personal favorite, though–and the only one slightly funny enough to count–is @HulkBiden.

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Martha Raddatz is more popular than Jim Lehrer as moderator

The ABC news reporter’s moderating skills seemed to get more cheers than jeers, unlike those of Lehrer from the presidential debate, whose performance inspired the @silentjimlehrer account. In fact, some people on Twitter even expressed wishes that they could vote for Raddatz for president in November. Tone it down a notch, kids. We actually do have a president to elect soon.

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