Conan O’Brien might “Need a Friend,” but not one like Paul Rudd!
The real-life besties continued their long-running prank, this time on O’Brien’s “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast. Rudd dropped by the podcast to tease a (faux) show he’s developing as a scripted narrative podcast for Audible.
As Rudd listed the all-star cast that signed on to lend their voices to the series, including Adam Scott, Ken Marino, and Celia Watson, O’Brien listened as though it was fact. The series supposedly stars Rudd as a publicist who falls in love with a woman working in a craft store in New Orleans: Lifetime rom-com movie, much?
“It’s been really kind of great because I don’t normally get the opportunity to work on my own things like that,” Rudd said on the podcast. “I’m usually a hired gun. But it’s been fun, and I’ve been working on it and recording it with my friends.”
He then asked to play a clip to preview the series — and pranked O’Brien once again with the infamous 1988 “Mac and Me” scene where a child in a wheelchair falls off a cliff and a surprised alien watches.
“You can’t do that on a podcast!” O’Brien joked. “That’s why I didn’t see it coming! You can’t do that on a podcast, it’s a visual joke. It’s an audio medium.”
Rudd replied, “I know, would it work that way? Well, I can always try to find out…I thought it was worth the attempt.”
And Rudd confirmed that “none of that was true” about his faux Audible project. O’Brien joked that it was the 165,000th time and probably the millionth time O’Brien has “grown increasingly angry” at Rudd.
The long-running prank between O’Brien and Rudd started in 2004 when Rudd first showed O’Brien the “Mac and Me” clip on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” while promoting the “Friends” series finale.
After O’Brien’s TBS talk show “Conan” ended in June 2021, Rudd crashed an interview with Bill Hader to play the clip, seemingly, for the final time.
“It’s been like 25 years of you coming on the show,” Conan said at the time. “Every time, for years, I would be convinced that I would see the real clip [of a current project] because you are such a genuinely nice person… And then you pull that shit every time!”
Check out the new podcast prank below.
Paul Rudd plays Conan a clip from his upcoming scripted podcast #CONAF Check out the full episode here: https://t.co/OEmhlv3z4A pic.twitter.com/LJ7MObbvP0
— Team Coco (@TeamCoco) March 29, 2022
