First Lady Michelle Obama appeared on Stephen Colbert's new late show last night and something unexpected happened -- a brief stretch of conversation that was actually funny.

Prior to that, Colbert appeared nervous in Mrs. Obama's presence, frequently interrupting and talking over her.

But the interview finally delivered during an exchange where former president Bill Clinton came up, albeit indirectly, and in a way he'd surely not find amusing.

If anyone is a media darling, it’s Michelle Obama. Less than 7 years into her husband’s presidency, Obama has boasted roughly 50 more media appearances than Laura Bush did in 8 years. 

The First Lady receives compliments on everything from her dancing to her workout regime to her graduation speeches. Yet, Mrs. Obama is probably best known for her campaign against childhood obesity. One of her programs, the annual “Healthy Lunchtime Challenge,” encourages grade-school children to submit a healthy recipe to the competition. This year, 54 winners chosen from over 1,000 entrants were invited to the White House for a kids’ “State Dinner.”

Let’s hope Michelle Obama is keeping a scrapbook of all the gushy positive stories written for her by Washington Post reporter Krissah Thompson. In Friday’s Post, the Style section front page carried a foot-high picture of the First Lady in a black robe and the all-caps headline “MICHELLE OBAMA COMMENCES TELLING IT AS SHE SEES IT.” 

All around the picture were little yellow quote bubbles of her most inspirational quotations from her commencement speeches with “unusual candor” on race and class.

Last Friday, author and historian Garry Wills, who blogs occasionally at the New York Review of Books site, praised Michelle Obama for challenging, in her recent Tuskegee University commencement address, conservatives’ complacency about race in America. Specifically, Wills approved of the first lady’s “breaking all of the four rules of racial discourse the right wing now wants to enforce.”

“The celebrators of rugged individualism will not allow successful blacks to reach back and help others up the ladder of achievement. That is just rewarding the ‘takers over the makers,’” wrote Wills. “But when we see or read the speech of Michelle Obama, stingy individualists melt down into their pooled little meannesses, and this tall black woman of achievement calls on us all to mount into the sky, following the Tuskegee Airmen. This is not playing the race card. It is playing the American card.”

Following in lockstep with their morning counterparts, Monday’s CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News continued to prominently tout First Lady Michelle Obama’s commencement address at Tuskegee University from two days prior. Hailing the speech as “candid reflections on life in the spotlight,” CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley gushed that Obama revealed “some remarkable insight” into what it’s been like to be the first African-American First Lady and that “it sounded a lot like a validictory.”