Anderson Cooper on that time his 85-year-old mother tried to be the surrogate for his child

"Your sperm shouldn't be anywhere near your mom," Howard Stern tells Anderson Cooper on his SiriusXM radio show. While that should be an obvious statement, the fact it had to be said is a special moment in broadcasting.

A little context: Cooper's wonderfully eccentric mother, the late Gloria Vanderbilt, offered to carry the ashen CNN anchor's child years ago when she was still a spry and apparently womb-viable 85 years old, and Cooper discussed the hilarious tale on a recent episode of The Howard Stern Show.

Roy Rochlin/FilmMagic Anderson Cooper with mom Gloria Vanderbilt in 2016

"This is like eight years before I decided to have a child," Cooper began. "But my mom really wanted me to have a kid, and she called me up one time and she was like, 'Honey, there's something I really need to talk to you about.'"

Cooper had heard his mother say that one too many times in his life, so he braced himself for potentially having to "hide a body" and went over to his mother's apartment where she told him the most "amazing" news.

"She was like, 'Well the most amazing thing happened,'" he recalled. "'I went to the gynecologist the other day,' — preface this, my mom was 85 at the time — 'and she said the most amazing thing, she told me I could still bear a child.'"

Having spent his life not reacting to his mother's "crazy statements" — which, he notes, helped him greatly in his career as a serious, unflappable journalist — Cooper agreed with Gloria that this was indeed "the most amazing thing" and began to wonder how he was going to talk his mother out of bearing a child.

"Which is a thought, I'm sure, we've all had," the former Madonna background "dancer" quips.

To Cooper's relief, or not, Vanderbilt informed him that she wasn't planning on having her own child, but she just wanted to help him by carrying his potential seed.

Cooper's reaction: "I said, 'Mom, I love you, but even for you this is bats--- crazy.'"

The 56-year-old eventually had two kids of his own without, one assumes, his mother's uterus.

"How great would that have been if you had impregnated your mother?" a thoroughly bemused Stern asks his guest, who clarifies that he wouldn't actually have been impregnating her.

But...he kinda would've been, as Stern points out, leading to that little nugget of wisdom, "Your sperm shouldn't be anywhere near your mom."

Put it on a T-shirt, put it on a tote, and watch the clip below:

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