Conan has always been my favorite late night talk show. Most nights it has me literally laughing until I can’t breathe. After renting the 10th anniversary special, I was wondering, what are some of your funny favorite moments from the show?
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog goes to the Star Wars premier.
*Guy dressed up as Vader - *“And this button helps me breathe”
*Triumph - *“And which button calls your parents to come pick you up?”
Every time Conan does the string dance.
*Conan, dressed as a trucker driving a semi - * When will the government get off our backs! We’re truckers, dammit! We just wanna live…
Also the State Quarters segment. South Dakota’s quarter had a picture of a black guy on it saying something along the line of “South Dakota - come see our first black guy!” North Dakota’s quarter had a picture of a girl whispering in a man’s ear and it said, “Hey, have you heard about South Dakota’s black guy?”
His “Walker: Texas Ranger” lever is surprisingly hilarious every time. I also like his ongoing attempt to insult every country in the world. Alphabetically.
Yep. I would have thought this would get old pretty quick, but it’s actually comedy gold.
I like some of his old stand-bys: the Actual Items…
…What’s On Other Channels (“Inappropriate!” “Not cool, Zeus!”)…
…a look at the future (“all the way to the Year 2000!”) He’s had some guests help with this (William Shatner; Mr. T), but I miss Andy. There’s one I vaguely remember Andy doing that had to do with a new name for diarrhea that almost gave me diarrhea I was laughing so hard.
The Star Wars bit was gold. Clutch Cargo (the lips) is usually great. I think my favorite was when Rush Limbaugh was on, threw a ton of pills in his mouth and started tripping. I think they also had Arnold Schwarzenegger on that time.
One other that I forgot. Conan decided he wants to make his own boy band so he recruits 5 guys that, for the most part, sing rather badly. The name of the band cracks me up - Dudez a plenti. And he puts one of the guys in a wheelchair!
-One time, they revealed that the Masturbating Bear was Jim Carrey.
-His “In The Year 2000” sketches, though anachronistic now (and FUCK anachronisms!), are always gold. My favorite one: “In the year 2000, the American Society of Rapists officially declare that no means yes.”
IMHO, just about anything Conan O’Brien does is genius. He did, after all, graduate from Harvard.
I always liked the “In The Year 2000” skits. Whenever he makes fun of Anna Nicole Smith is amusing as well. The most recent hilarious bit I can think of was the show after he & his wife had just had their baby, so his guests were bringing him bottles of alcohol as gifts. Naturally, he proceeded to drink them, and was rather tipsy by the end of the show.
I don’t get to watch Conan that much these days, but there was one show that’ll always stick in my mind. His guests were Al Franken, Dave Chappelle, and some Irish writer. Al was talking about one of his SNL characters, Liam the Loose-Boweled Leprechaun. He had a catchphrase: “I’ve got me a wee bit of the diahrrea.” Sounds a bit immature, but he made it sound funny as hell. Dave Chappelle was his usual hilarious self. I don’t remember a whole lot about the Irish guy.
I guess this stands out because this is pretty much the only time I’ve ever seen his guests actually be funnier than he is.
Conan’s great, and so are his writers. Who else would come up with characters like Pimp-Bot 5000, the Gaseous Weiner, Preparation H Raymond, and Tokey the Anti-Drug Bong?
About the only thing I don’t like is “If They Mated”.
I loved the old bit where Andy’s “teenage sister” would be sitting in the audience and Conan would start talking to her. It always started out really sweet, with her revealing she had a crush on Conan. She would be wearing and talking through a retainer or headgear, and was pretty geeky looking overall. When it was clear he didn’t share her feelings, things would get ugly fast. By the end of the bit she would be screaming at the top of her lungs, damning Conan and swearing revenge. The actress who played the part (I think it was Amy Pohler–now on Saturday Night Live) always did such a great job, she really cracked me up.
I also like when Conan sings. There’s the one bit where he sings a soft lullaby to all the babies watching on television, then tells the parents to turn their babies “Away from…the TV screen” as they show clips of people in sports accidents or getting their eyes operated on and such.
The other singing bit is where he picks a person or a couple from the audience and brings them to sit up front. They tell him a little about themselves, and Conan makes up a song about them. Except that he starts to make up stuff–not very flattering stuff–about the people. It gets worse and worse until they wind up chasing him around the stage while he continues to play and sing.
In the first season they did a sketch called “Thin, Thin Ice” that was supposed to be an instant TV-movie about the Tonya Harding - Nancy Kerrigan thing. They had Scott Thompson playing Tonya Harding, wearing a tutu. Conan was Jeff Gillooly and Andy was the other goon, I forget his name.
[Mr. T]
(in the year 2000…) Fools will come to my house to ask me to stop pitying them. But it will be raining and I won’t be home, so I will continue to pity them.
[/Mr. T]
