A few months ago, a bizarre competition broke out among various TV hosts, with Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver all sending staffers to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to secure wax president statues being auctioned off by the Wax Presidential Museum. (Oliver—who bought five of the creepy homunculi—ran a typically extensive piece on the sales on Last Week Tonight earlier this month.) The sale didn’t come up when Colbert and Oliver got together on Colbert’s CBS show earlier this week—presumably because they were too busy dissecting the political heat-death of the American government—but fans of waxy heads of state were in luck last night. As a bonus for fans of the two Daily Show alumni, The Late Show offered up an extra clip of the two duking it out via faux-presidential proxies.
And while Oliver pretty clearly wins the insult battle between “Warren G. Harding” and “Zachary Taylor”—no offense to Colbert, but he just couldn’t match the vitriol Oliver hurled at Taylor’s “tender tummy”—the real winner was democracy, as the two hosts made it clear that, political differences and lack of internal organs aside, their two political rivals were still (kind of) capable of kissing and making up.