The biggest winner (or loser) to come out of last week’s presidential debate made a surprise appearance on this weekend’s edition of Saturday Night Live.

It wasn’t Barack Obama. It wasn’t Mitt Romney. It was Big Bird.

Despite it being 7 hours past his bedtime, the Sesame Street star stopped by Weekend Update with Seth Myers to comment on Romney's promise to stop subsidizing PBS, and in the process, educated Seth Meyers on tweets and told a political joke of his own.

Big Bird became a focal point of the presidential debate when Romney said he would cut government funding to the bird’s home channel, PBS.

Here's the quote: "What things would I cut from spending? Well, first of all, I will eliminate all programs by this test, if they don't pass it: Is the program so critical it's worth borrowing money from China to pay for it? And if not, I'll get rid of it. Obamacare's on my list. ... I'm sorry, Jim, I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I'm going to stop other things. I like PBS, I love Big Bird. Actually like you, too. But I'm not going to -- I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for. That's number one."

The comment came in response to a question about how Romney would cut the deficit. Romney continued, "Number two, I'll take programs that are currently good programs but I think could be run more efficiently at the state level and send them to the state. Number three, I'll make government more efficient and to cut back the number of employees, combine some agencies and departments. My cutbacks will be done through attrition, by the way. This is the approach we have to take to get America to a balanced budget."

"The president said he'd cut the deficit in half. Unfortunately, he doubled it. Trillion-dollar deficits for the last four years. The president's put it in place as much public debt -- almost as much debt held by the public as al prior presidents combined."

The Big Bird comment, however, is what has Twitter viewers buzzing. It generated 17,000 Tweets per minute when it was first quoted, then spawned a range of Big Bird memes and Twitter accounts.