Neil Gorsuch stumped by viral ‘horse-sized duck’ question during confirmation hearing
Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?
That’s a question Judge Neil Gorsuch couldn’t quite muster up an answer for during day two of his marathon Supreme Court confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill Tuesday afternoon.
Before moving on to more serious topics, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., posed the popular hypothetical question to Gorsuch at the urging of his teenage son Dallin.
“My family’s been texting me throughout this process, asking me to ask question that they would ask,” Flake said. “I asked a few of them for suggestions, and my son Dallin, a teenager, said, ‘Ask him if he would rather fight a hundred duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck.’”
Gorsuch smiled and shook his head as the audience laughed in a much-needed moment of levity during the top of ninth inning for the hearings.
“I’d never heard it either,” Flake said. “Apparently it was a question on Reddit awhile ago. Anyway, that’s where it’s going from here, I think.”
“You can tell him I’m very rarely at a loss for words, but you got me,” Gorsuch said.
“I will tell him a teenager stumped you there,” Flake joked.
At the suggestion of his brother Scott, Flake also asked whether Gorsuch had ever worn gym shorts and a tank top under his robe. Gorsuch responded by jokingly pleading the Fifth Amendment, which protects against self-incrimination.
According to Know Your Meme, the earliest known iteration of the “duck-sized horses” meme, which asked whether the horses or duck would be victorious, appeared in a Metro newspaper in October 2013. The clipping is preserved on the blog City of Sound.
The question spread throughout the 2000s on Yahoo Answers and other sites before becoming an inside joke among Redditors during their popular Ask Me Anything sessions.
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