Will Ferrell heckles Elf costar Andy Richter on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

To Kimmel’s playful, “It’s Buddy the Elf!,” Ferrel immediately corrected, “I’m not Buddy the Elf, you fopdoodle. I’m Will Ferrell from the Land of the Lost movie.” Similarly shutting down Richter’s assumption that Ferrell (who wrote the forward to Richter’s book) was there to help him drum up sales, the surly Ferrell asked, “Are you high? Who even are you?,” before recalling, “Andy Richter from the Olsen twins movie, New York Minute? Oh, my God, that’s a great movie. When you kidnap Trey, the senator’s son, I love that.” Things went downhill at that point, with the belligerent Ferrell claiming not to know what Richter was doing there and responding to Richter’s claim that he’d interviewed Ferrell for his book by exclaiming, “Is that what that was? I thought you were some Make-A-Wish kid.” Finally recalling at least that Richter had been in the same movie, Ferrell brightened, “Wait! I remember now! You were in Elf. You played the guy who came up with bad ideas for unpopular books, and now you wrote one?”

This isn’t the first time Ferrell’s donned a raggedy-looking Buddy costume and smoked and drank his way through a public event, having previously explained his previous outing at an L.A. Kings game by saying simply, “I get these weird ideas every now and then.” Referencing Richter’s former career, Ferrell teased that his next book, My Years Sitting Next to Conan O’Brien: The Will Ferrell Story will certainly outshine Richter’s. “What do you know about sitting next to Conan?,” Richter asked, only for Ferrell to close out the bit by sneering, “I spent more time sitting next to Conan than you did working on Elf.” Will Ferrell is, indeed, an angry elf.