It’s a great time to be a Conan O’Brien fan, between his podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend still going strong, his travel series Conan O’Brien Must Go being available to stream with a Max subscription, and March seeing him both host the 97th Academy Awards and receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor (the latter of which can be watched with a Netflix subscription). However, many still remember him best from his late night talk show days, starting with his 16-year stint hosting Late Night after being a writer on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons.
While there were plenty of popular sketches from his Late Night tenure (where Sarah Silverman bounced back after being fired from SNL), O’Brien recently spent some time going over the more obscure offerings he and his writers created. Additionally, he recalled the time he wanted to change the name of the show to something wild, yet I’m not surprised at all it came out of that mind of his.
What Conan O’Brien’s Favorite Obscure Late Night Sketches Are
If you watched Conan O’Brien host Late Night back in the day, some of the sketches that come to mind probably include Masturbating Bear, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, The Interrupter, Pimpbot 5000 and, my personal favorite, the Walker, Texas Ranger lever. But when O’Brien stopped by Late Night with Seth Meyers, his first time revisiting the show since he left in 2009, he dedicated some time to the lesser-known sketches, starting with:
There are some that no one ever mentions that I loved, which was, we did ‘Horse Riding A Horse.’
Yep, that’s exactly how it sounds: a guy in a horse costume riding atop an actual horse; simple, yet effective. But wait, it gets even more random, as then Conan O’Brien said:
There’s no idea behind it, I was always looking for silliness that resonated in my brain. There was another one we did, which was called ‘The Always Disappointing FedEx Pope’ starring Brian McCann. It was just a guy pretending he was the pope with a FedEx box, and I loved it.
Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over thinking about a version of the streaming hit Conclave involving the The Always Disappointing FedEx Pope. Conan O’Brien then mentioned a take on one of the most famous X-Men characters who’s way less useful than the real deal:
I love ‘Shoe-verine’ by Andrew Weinberg. It was Wolverine, but he had shoes on his hands. So, those were the ones I liked.
Yeah, I’ll take adamantium claws over shoes for hands every time, although at least Shoe-verine’s punches would pack a little extra oomph. These characters exemplify O’Brien’s sense of humor when it comes to the visual medium, which he described thusly:
I’ve always had a cartoonish sense of humor, and I like things to be visually silly. I always thought, ‘I want people to laugh at this show if the sound is off.’
Wacky fits Conan O’Brien to a tee, but those kind of antics are a key reason why he remains popular. Even in Conan O’Brien Must Go, he finds hilarious ways to visually amuse, oftentimes just by donning a costume or silly outfit. So while the aforementioned Late Night characters are obscure, it’s understandable why he still thinks fondly of them.
What Conan O’Brien Wanted To Call His Show Instead Of Late Night
Conan O’Brien succeeded David Letterman on Late Night, who’d been hosting the series for 11 years before moving over to CBS to start The Late Show after being passed over for The Tonight Show. Between Letterman’s lengthy run and O’Brien basically being an unknown, there was a lot riding on him to stand out as the new Late Night host. Later on in his conversation with Seth Meyers, O’Brien recalled how he and original writer Robert Smigel felt a good way to do this was to change the title of the show.
I remembered we were so afraid of being compared to Letterman, because he’s a genius. He invented this time slot and this sensibility. And we kept thinking, ‘We don’t want to be associated [with that.] We want people to think we’re doing something different. Let’s not use the name Late Night.’ And Robert and I became convinced that we should change the name to Nighty Night. I’m not kidding. We were convinced that it should be Nighty Night with Conan O’Brien.
Nighty Night With Conan O’Brien does have a nice ring to it, but it would have been a huge mistake to go through with retitling. Fortunately, this got the kibosh after O’Brien and Smigel with NBC executive Rick Ludwin, with O’Brien joking that he saw “four blood vessels burst” in the man’s head. Ludwin informed the men that Late Night was a “proven franchise” that would “long outlive” them, so they just dropped the idea and “ran away.”
Conan O’Brien’s late night TV days might be behind him, but it’s still easy to find him interviewing people and entertaining the masses on the small screen in multiple ways. Looking ahead, Conan O’Brien Must Go was renewed for Season 3 in March, he’ll be back to host the Oscars in 2026, and he’s voicing Smartypants in Toy Story 5.
