Hillary Clinton addressed the the racially charged joke included in a skit she participated in over the weekend, telling Cosmopolitan on Tuesday that she was just a participant in New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s skit.
“Well, look, it was Mayor de Blasio’s skit. He has addressed it, and I will really defer to him because it is something that he’s already talked about,” Clinton told Cosmopolitan when asked whether the joke was inappropriate.
Clinton made a brief appearance in a skit at the annual Inner Circle dinner on Saturday, where she joked to de Blasio, “Thanks for the endorsement, Bill. Took you long enough.”
“Sorry Hillary, I was running on C.P. time,” he responded, referencing the negative stereotype “Colored People Time.”
Leslie Odom Jr., a star of the Broadway show “Hamilton,” who was also participating in the skit, responded to de Blasio, “That’s not – I don’t like jokes like that, Bill.”
Clinton then jumped in to joke that she’s dealt with “cautious politician time.”
Following outcry over the joke, de Blasio defended the skit.
“It was clearly a staged show, it was a scripted show. The whole idea was to do the counterintuitive,” he told CNN. “Every actor involved, including Hillary Clinton and Leslie Odom Jr., thought it was a joke on a different convention, that was the whole idea of it, so I think people are missing the point here.”
Correction: The original version of this post incorrectly stated that Clinton told de Blasio, “I don’t like jokes like that” in the Saturday skit. That line belonged to Leslie Odom Jr. We regret the error.
