Activist/actor Sean Penn appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert Tuesday to opine that Americans have two options this November: “stick it out” under a Hillary Clinton presidency or “masturbate our way into hell” with Donald Trump.

As The Washington Times reported, Penn was on the late-night show to promote an audiobook he narrated, Pappy Pariah’s Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff (no, it's not a children's book). Colbert asked Penn, whose face is starting to look like the rust-colored, craggy strata of a Grand Canyon wall, what he thought of the presidential debate Monday night. Penn laughed it off and told Colbert that we have two options:

"Either you can decide to divorce yourself from loving your children and piss on a tree and show that you have the power to piss on a tree. Or you can go out and vote in a very big way for someone like Hillary Clinton — who then you can challenge and support, which is the only way that any kind of president can have any success — and you stick it out for four years. Or we can just masturbate our way into hell with a guy who looks like the only blonde magician.”

We don't know what he's talking about, but the studio audience got a big kick out of the word "masturbate," which gives you some idea of the level of maturity and political intelligence of Colbert's viewers.

Colbert then asked why Penn was willing to take so much heat for "sitting down" with “dictators” like former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuban President Raul Castro. Penn seemed to resent the word “dictator,” suggesting that Chavez was somehow an enthusiastically elected favorite because he “went through 14 to 16 internationally observed elections — more than any leader that we have goes through.” The smug Penn -- who doesn't just "sit down" with dictators; he literally embraces them as friends -- apparently isn't smart enough to know that dictators often hold sham "elections" to "prove" they have popular support.

Anyway, Penn tried to present himself as a merely curious independent truthseeker who wants to cut through all the media bias:

“My primary interest has been that the United States, or I should say its media at large, when they demonize foreign leaders and therefore demonize in many cases their populations, this gets me interested to see what’s the perspective from that place?

“I’ve just been interested to see it without watching it on Fox News, or CNN, or The New York Times, and to see if I saw something different,” he said. “And I’ve written what I think about it, and I’m willing to be called the names that I’ve been called.”

So his answer is that these dictators aren't dictators -- they've been unfairly "demonized" by American media.

Penn's most recent films are The Gunman, which raked in an underwhelming $10.6 million in theaters on a $40 million budget, and the animated Angry Birds, in which he has a supporting voiceover role.