The vice president gazed into the mirror, reached out her hand and told her comedic reflection that she had this election thing in the bag.

“I’m just here to remind you — you got this,” the actual vice president said to Maya Rudolph, the comedian who has portrayed Kamala Harris for years on “Saturday Night Live.” She then added a jab about former President Donald J. Trump’s fumbled attempt to enter a garbage truck this week: “Because you can do something your opponent cannot do. You can open doors.”

It wasn’t cringe, which is the only bar that needs clearing for a high-risk live television appearance during the final hours of a breakneck presidential campaign.

And maybe it was not viral comedy gold, either. That is a feat more easily achieved by someone like the veteran comedian Dana Carvey, who played a rhetorically unburdened President Biden in the first minutes of the show’s cold open. Or by James Austin Johnson, who portrayed former President Donald J. Trump and joked about his tactile relationship with a microphone and his volatile relationship with his former vice president, Mike Pence.