Just presidential candidate John Hickenlooper talking about watching porn with his mom

There are many, many people running for president and former Governor of Colorado John Hickenlooper is definitely one of them. Last night, in hopes of distinguishing himself from an increasingly crowded field, Hickenlooper appeared on CNN as a part of a town hall special. The gambit worked: Hickenlooper is no longer an anonymous candidate among many, but rather the guy who took his mom to see a porno flick.

As seen in the clip above, the pornographic film in question was 1972's iconic Deep Throat, the film that briefly made porn something of a mainstream phenomenon. Hickenlooper claims he originally intended to go with his buddy Jed, only to have Jed bail, so he decided that he should invite his mom to be polite. Hickenlooper did not expect his mom to say yes, but say yes she did so off they went to watch some sex together. Once there, despite quickly realizing what an awkward situation they were in, Hickenlooper and his mother stayed for the entire 61 minutes since, sorry, no refunds.

Hickenlooper first wrote about this incident in his memoir, The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics. It’s the sort of anecdote that is meant to make a candidate seem relatable, and we suppose it is, provided you too have taken your mom to the adult movie theater to watch some porn. “I didn’t know what an X-movie was,” he says. “We thought it was a little naughty but we didn’t think it was that bad.”

“It was a pretty famous movie, too,” CNN’s Dana Bash offers, and, indeed, this seems a situation in which a quick “what’s it about?” could’ve done a world of good.

Somehow, Hickenlooper living through the subplot of an American Pie sequel isn’t even the weirdest sex-adjacent thing a presidential candidate’s done this week. The resurfacing of this story comes not long after upstart candidate Andrew Yang formally came out against circumcision, while table-stander Beto O’Rourke was recently revealed to have once written poems about “butt shines” under the pseudonym “Psychedelic Warlord.” None of this really matters in the grand scope of the 2020 election, of course, except to serve as a reminder that, oh god, we’ve still got 20 months of this shit to go.