The talk-show host messes with the genre’s tropes while acting like a nitwit in multiple countries.
When Conan O’Brien appeared on Hot Ones last week, he did the opposite of what most guests do on that show. Instead of dabbing his chicken wings in conservative dollops of hot sauce, he submerged them to the point of drowning. He sucked every piece of meat off of every bone, at one point dramatically licking a wing covered in Da’Bomb Beyond Insanity, a condiment almost single-handedly responsible for Idris Elba’s murder on the series in 2019. Rather than wipe away tears or snot, O’Brien let everything fly so that, by the end of the episode, milk, mucus, and other unidentifiable fluids were streaming down his face while he screamed out a promo for his new travel series, Conan O’Brien Must Go.
The internet naturally went wild over all this, turning the moment into an opportunity to share classic Conan clips and celebrate the former late-night host’s eagerness to go for the most broken version of broke in any scenario. But his Hot Ones appearance is also a reminder of what has always been the secret to O’Brien’s success: his ability to enter well-established media formats — the family sitcom via his time as a Simpsons writer, the late-night talk show, the celebrity-interview podcast — and blow them up with his postmodern version of vaudevillian absurdity.
That’s what he does for the docuseries form in Conan O’Brien Must Go, a new Max series inspired by Conan O’Brien Needs a Fan, a podcast spinoff of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend in which O’Brien has in-depth conversations with admirers from all over the globe. In the Max show, whose four episodes drop simultaneously this Thursday, O’Brien actually goes to visit some of those fans — the host swears that none of them know in advance that the world’s most recognizable redhead and his film crew are about to show up — while also visiting various cities to theoretically learn more about each country’s culture. O’Brien did something similar in Conan Without Borders, a series of specials that ran on TBS when O’Brien also hosted Conan on the network. Perhaps because Conan O’Brien Must Go is a series rather than spread-out one-offs, or maybe because it seems to have a more robust budget, this version is much more blatant about its interest in riffing on and subverting the tropes of the travel format.
Each of the episodes — set in Norway, Argentina, Thailand, and Ireland — begins with majestic cinematography and a deeply serious voiceover narration from distinguished filmmaker Werner Herzog as he describes the beauty of our planet. Then Herzog, in his thick German accent, utters what is basically the mission statement of the show: “To truly appreciate the astounding grandeur of this planet, sometimes you must defile it. Behold,” he adds, “the defiler.” Cut to clips from the series of O’Brien making an ass of himself on multiple continents.
The first theoretical rule of being a travel-show host is to keep the focus on the places and people you’re visiting rather than yourself. O’Brien takes the paper that rule is written on and sets it on fire. In classic Conan fashion, he makes everything about himself. Crucially, he’s always the butt of the joke and the obvious jester, never a mocker of other people’s traditions. In Bergen, Norway, he “helps” one of his fans, a hip-hop musician, by insisting on singing on one of his songs in a very high falsetto. In Buenos Aires, he commissions another fan, an artist, to paint a mural of O’Brien with his arms around the pope and soccer star Lionel Messi, underneath a banner that says “Hijos sagrados de Argentina,” or “Sacred sons of Argentina.” (In case this wasn’t abundantly clear: Conan O’Brien is an Irish American who grew up in Massachusetts and has zero connection to Argentina.) In an especially clever and very Conan bit, when the host first arrives in Ireland, he says, “As soon as I landed, I knew that I was with my people,” at which point the camera captures several different Irish men and women, all of whom are just O’Brien in costume.
Conan O’Brien Must Go even highlights the mechanics of making a travel show and Conan-izes them for the sake of comedy. O’Brien points out that he can afford drones for this series, which he uses for the least inspired reasons he can conjure. In the Norway episode, he waxes poetic about how stunning the northern lights look, then the camera pans to a wide shot and reveals that he’s actually sitting in his hotel, staring at a picture of the northern lights on his laptop. This show is relentless in its silliness. This is meant as the highest compliment.
Most travel-show hosts try to make their interview subjects comfortable, but that is not O’Brien’s goal. After getting a Norwegian to admit his people do not like having their space invaded, he slowly licks the entirety of the man’s left cheek. After being fitted for a formal suit in Bangkok, O’Brien pontificates about nonsense in English at great length, while the owner of the shop assumes an expression similar to the one Chris Pine made while trying to beam himself onto some other celestial plane during the Don’t Worry Darling press tour.
O’Brien even calls attention to specific subgenres that fall underneath the travel-show umbrella. While visiting Merrion Square Park in Dublin, a place that U2 front man Bono is allegedly known to frequent, the series briefly turns into a nature program called Finding Bono in which O’Brien tries to track the elusive rock star. (He almost “catches him” by using a fake global humanitarian award as bait.) Before trying some of the black pudding that Ireland is famous for, O’Brien nods to Stanley Tucci’s foodie-focused CNN travel series by noting that Tucci always looks like he’s having “six orgasms” after he tries a bite of any dish. Not to be outdone, after a couple tastes of black pudding, O’Brien engages in a deranged form of modern dance that leads to him writhing on the floor while the owner of the shop he’s visiting looks on, stupefied.
This is what O’Brien was born to do: gyrate on the floor in public, in his land of origin, in the hope that someone, somewhere on this planet filled with astounding grandeur, will laugh. He truly is the defiler. At 61 years old — his birthday falls on the same day as Conan O’Brien Must Go’s release date — he is also, still, a comedy king.
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