Conan O’Brien’s adrenaline junkie came out facing the wings of death on “Hot Ones,” leading him to drink two different hot sauces and devour far more than the required amount of each wing.
The comedian bragged that he could remember the plot of his upcoming docuseries “Conan O’Brien Must Go” after consuming all 10 levels of hot wings, his insides ablaze.
“It’s a funny show. Four episodes going to drop and me going all over the world. You can check it out on April 18. That’s right,” he told host Sean Evans near the end of the segment, milk and saliva spilling over his chin. “My intestines have turned into acid, and I can still remember the plot. That’s a professional. If there was a mic drop, I’d do one. But I’m going to do a wing drop.”
Earlier, in one of the first questions about the show, podcast and late-night host O’Brien leaned into sarcasm about the goal of his world travel.
“My mission is that you learn nothing about the country. My job is that you know less about the country after I’m done than when I started,” he said. “That’s why I love this new show, is Max just let us go for it, and we visited a bunch of countries, and you’re dumber. You’re dumber after you see the show, but we had a lot of fun.”
O’Brien brought his alleged personal physician Dr. Arroyo, who is “not very good, but very affordable,” to assess his health as he went through the wings. The doctor never named what school he graduated from, and his techniques were questionable — like putting O’Brien in a chokehold to check his pulse and putting a stethoscope on the comedian’s tongue.
“I don’t think there’s a wing here that I can’t eat like ice cream,” he said after the fourth sauce. “Seriously, I don’t think there’s a wing on this table that I can’t devour like it’s cool whipped cream on an August afternoon.”
He passed a wing to Dr. Arroyo to pocket, because his own pockets were getting full as one of his ongoing bits in the interview was pocketing the wings after eating the meat off each one. Then he recounted his experience mounting the back of a water buffalo, which he said threw him off immediately and charged everyone in the studio. He revealed he had to be cut out of his jeans because of a large hematoma on his hip.
“The water buffalo and I made amends,” he said. “We’re good now.”
As the gauntlet continued, O’Brien kept saving a few bitten wings and drank the sauce in the seventh slot, known as the forbidden fruit. He licked the wing with the notorious “Da Bomb” sauce as well, which he later admitted that he regretted.
“You can’t stop me from being who I am. To quote my hero Popeye, ‘I am what I am.’ I said it, and Gandhi said it, and Popeye said it,” O’Brien explained.
He also gulped the last dab, or tenth slot, sauce.
“I’m perfectly f–king fine,” he claimed, with tears in his eyes.
His longtime collaborator Robert Smigel, also known as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, celebrated the audacity of his former boss:
Watch the full video at the top of this story.
