Conan O’Brien Explained for Zoomers Who Only Know Him From ‘Hot Ones’

This past Thursday, some Irish-American father somewhere in the country broke out his old VHS player, sat down his teenaged son and showed him how that Hot Ones psychopath used to be the most beloved old timey baseball player on the planet.

After he rubbed 680,000 Scoville hot sauce onto his nipples and before he retched his plug for Conan O’Brien Must Go with milk and spittle dribbling from his irradiated chin, Conan O’Brien begged young Hot Ones viewers to seek comedy from every source and every time period, insisting that “these aren’t the rantings of someone who's had some bad chemicals and overdid it to be funny and relevant to people who are at least 50 years younger than him!” 

And, in the days following the posting of his spectacular Hot Ones episode on YouTube, Conan’s desperately targeted audience has heeded his advice by pouring through old clips from Late Night, Conan and even his controversially short stint on The Tonight Show on social media. Thanks to the Wings of Death, Generation Z finally gets to see what late-night comedy was supposed to be before the medium talents took over.

Since the Hot Ones episode “dropped,” as Conan was told the kids call it, social media sites like Twitter have been so inundated with videos of sketches and interviews from Conan’s career that you’d think the iconic entertainer had dropped dead from spice poisoning the second the cameras stopped rolling at First We Feast. 

To celebrate this welcome change of pace wherein a best-of reel from one of history’s greatest comedians has replaced the usual mind-numbing culture war trends, here are a small handful of those highlights from Conan’s career that cannot be missed by teens and twenty-somethings looking for a crash course on Coco…