While we thought Hillary Clinton’s book tour was finally over, on Tuesday night she turned up on late night again for a name-dropping contest with Stephen Colbert. The appearance was a surprise, and not only because Clinton showed up four minutes into the show and left before Colbert’s scheduled interview with director James Cameron. Clinton tried to look like she was having a good time during her lengthy Daily Show interview last month, but she was funnier and more natural on Colbert, even though the material was outside her comfort zone. Clinton is the rare human being who can easily give a long-winded answer on how to achieve peace in the Middle East, but Colbert had her do a scripted skit in which she attempted to resolve the “eternal question” of whether it’s preferable to fight one horse-size duck or 100 duck-size horses.
Clinton emerged as Colbert declared that her book is just “656 pages of shameless name-dropping,” and the two tried to one-up each other about hanging out with the likes of Bono and Oprah. “I will have you know, madam, I once did an entire show with President Bill Clinton,” Colbert declared. “I hate to break this to you, but I’ve met him, too,” Clinton quipped.
Next, Colbert accused Clinton of failing to address any real “hard choices” in the book (mercifully, the book’s title was referenced less than a dozen times). Clinton admitted that Colbert had a “valid question” about which bizarrely sized animal to battle with. She explained how she’d “find common ground between ducks and horses” in a goofy answer that worked about as well as an elaborate old-MacDonald’s-farm joke can.
Of course, not everyone was a fan of Clinton’s comic stylings. In the ensuing thread on Reddit, one user complained that she never really answered the horse-sized duck question. Another opined that political candidates shouldn’t do silly late-night skits, saying, “I hate stuff like this. I feel like we have turned politicians into pop stars and now we vote for the cool people in hollywood rather than people who represent us well.” If a skit this Reddit-y didn’t win them over, Clinton definitely shouldn’t let the internet ask her anything.
