Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann Friday evening hit the late-night comedy circuit with an appearance on NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

“If you become president — and you seem pretty strident in your views…,” Jay Leno said, before Bachmann interrupted him.

“Convicted. I’m convicted,” she said.

“Convicted?” Leno replied. “No, you don’t get convicted until after you’re in office. That’s later. You have to get elected first.”

Leno asked the Minnesota congresswoman about Monday’s GOP debate when she ripped rival Rick Perry for his executive order requiring young girls to receive inoculations against a sexually-transmitted disease that can cause cervical cancer and then later suggested that the vaccine could cause mental retardation.

“I wasn’t speaking as a doctor,” Bachmann said. “I wasn’t speaking as a scientist. I was just relating what this woman said. She came up and — I wasn’t soliciting that information, she gave it to me.  But the bigger issue in all this was the abuse of executive privilege and also just the connection of crony capitalism if you have a political donor that is giving to you and an action is taken by a government official that could potentially benefit that donor, that’s really the issue right now. That’s what people are worried about.”

Asked about her family’s Christian counseling clinic and if they try to make homosexuals “pray away the gay,” Bachmann pointed to her hair and joked, “When I heard that I really thought it was like kind of a mid-life crisis line, like, ‘Pray away the gray.’”

But unfortunately for her, the joke fell flat with the audience not laughing at all.

Later in the often awkward interview, Leno asked Bachmann who she would pick as her running mate and she said,

“You’re taken. You don’t want a cut in pay.” To which he replied, “Well, we’d probably have an argument over the gay thing.”

Also  Bachmann described the Tea Party as a group that stands for “pretty mainstream stuff.” And when asked about Rick Perry’s surge up the polls since he entered the race at the same time as she won the Iowa straw poll last month, Bachmann stated, “We’re in for the marathon. We’re not in it for the sprint.”