Conan (TV series): Difference between revisions

** Whenever Conan mentions [[Star Wars]], [[Harry Potter]], or any stereotypically geeky film, he'll do a nerd impression, then immediately apologize, due to fanbase overlap.

** In a "Fan Corrections" about Conan's fake beard, Andy remarked while putting a fake, ground-up paper beard on Conan's face:

* [[Black and Nerdy]]: Graphic Designer Pierre Bernard.

* [[Blatant Lies]]: In the intro to the "Fan Corrections" segment, Conan says, "There have been many challengers, but no winners. No one has ever been able to catch me make a mistake." Of course, every correction that comes in is accurate, meaning that many, many people have caught him making a mistake.

* [[Hilarious Outtakes]]: Team Coco posts unaired dress rehearsal outtakes on YouTube during hiatuses, such as a blooper from the "LaBamba covers his butt in honey and sits on some money" sketch where LaBamba sits on the honey without waiting for his cue to do so.

* [[Hypocritical Humor]]: Realized by Conan during a "Fan Corrections" when he was "insulting" one of the viewers who sent him a video; the person in question had orange hair.

* [[I'm Going to Hell For This]]: Sadly, the "I'mma gonna go to hell when I die" song hasn't shown up on TBS yet, but Conan will often announce that they're all going to hell when jokes move towards crossing the line.

* [[Important Haircut|Important Shave]]: On the Apr 18, 2011 episode (which was also Conan's birthday) Will Ferrell sent in a "Fan Corrections" video claiming that the "rusty pubes" on Conan's face were a mistake and threatening to shave them off when he was a guest on the show on May 2. This was followed-up with further threatening videos from Will, and a photoshop contest for the fans to portray what was dubbed "Beardpocalypse". And, as promised, Will's guest appearance on May 2nd was entirely centred around shaving Conan (badly, the job was finished for real by a professional during the commercial break). Conan said afterwards that it felt like he had come full-circle, as the last time Will had been his guest was on his last Tonight Show, right before he started growing the beard.

** Even better was when Tina Fey was interviewed and said she had a "clip of her book," Bossypants. The clip played and it was another Will Ferrell video, catching the audience by surprise.

* [[Incredibly Lame Pun]]: In an interview with NBA Rookie of the Year Blake Griffin, they discussed how he would top jumping over a car to win the dunk contest:

'''Conan:''' "Teammate on fire. Car on fire, alley-oop from teammate on fire, you're dressed as Chewbacca." *[[Beat]]* "Which would of course make you ''wookiee'' of the year, thank-you." Stands up and waves, crowd cheers and groans. }}

* [[Inner Monologue]]: As with the same recurring sketch from Late Night and The Tonight Show, Mike Merritt's derisive inner monologue while Conan speaks about racial equality. What follows is a series of Conan's So White... jokes.

* [[Jerkass]]: Conan is portrayed as this in the "Staffers' Kids Say the Darndest Things" segment, and also during the one-shot skit where he phoned various staff members' parents - he got irritated with certain kinds of chairs and ''threw the chairs out of their cubicles''.

** Basically, he'll play this up whenever he does a remote or interacts with his staff.

* [[Joisey]]: Chris Ultimo, a PA for the show, is more Jersey Shore than the cast of [[Jersey Shore]], although he comes across as a lot nicer and smarter than them.

* [[Jumping the Shark]]: Invoked by Conan, who said the jeggings episode was the moment, and claimed that because he had jumped so early (3 weeks in), he could just coast for the rest of his career.

** Used word-for-word by Conan when he wore the jeggings.

* [[Negative Continuity]]: Between segments. In one episode, LaBamba was "killed" in a wood-chipper, then was featured alive and well in the very next sketch. Conan, of course, points this out:

* [[News Parody]]: The segment "Local News Roundup", where Conan points out that to watch ''Conan'', you are missing your local news broadcast. But that's okay, because they're all pretty much the same anyways. Cue Conan and Andy's parody including generalized news stories, weather, sports, pet segments, and crazy local commercials.

* [[No Budget]]: Conan often complains that because they are on cable, they "don't have a lot of scratch". Particularly as the premise for "Basic Cable Name That Tune".

* [[Retcon]]: The Fan Corrections segments, in which Conan responds to allegations of [[Did Not Do the Research]] with [[Implausible Deniability|implausible]] [[Don't Explain the Joke|(and bogus)]] [[Shown Their Work|"proof"]].

* [[Rhyming with Itself]]: Parodied and lampshaded in "Thursday", Conan's parody of "Friday":

I am getting out of here. }}

* [[Running Gag]]: When Conan says something about how an episode won't air or is completely unusable, usually following some mistake or something completely random.

** For a couple weeks in early August 2011, someone named Steve Zampanides was announced as a guest. But he was continuously bumped in every episode due to running out of time, and each new episode listed him under a different specialty. Because of this, and also since there were few Google results for his name (aside from a Twitter account that was suspiciously created on August 9th and a website whose domain was owned by Team Coco), fans quickly caught on that this "Steve" wasn't a real person but actually a running gag created by the Conan staff. Probably as a result of this, the running gag abruptly ceased after a couple weeks.

* [[Self-Deprecation]]: Regularly takes shots at his new home on basic cable; his new band is referred to as the "Basic Cable Band".

''"Next week, WikiLeaks is threatening to leak what channel TBS is on."'' }}

** Conan sometimes opens the show with some variation of: "We've got a great show for you tonight. I'll watch this one, and I'm not a fan of this program. I don't like the host."

** Also, if something goes wrong on the show, Conan can be counted on to point it out, even if it was something that the viewers would never know about otherwise.

* [[Shoot the Money]]: When TBS sent out a blimp to promote the show, Conan declared on the air that they were obligated to get their money's worth for it, and did a series of sketches wherein the blimp was sent around LA to stalk Gary Busey. [[Axe Crazy|And it was]] [[Mugging the Monster|hilarious]].

* [[Show the Forehead]]

* [[Something Completely Different]]: When the mini set was debuted in the ''Puppy Conan'' sketch, Conan made an offhand comment that he wanted to do an entire show from that set. A few weeks later they did, and booked Shaquille O'Neal and Steve Schirripa as guests. [[Hilarity Ensued]].

* [[Studio Audience]]: Naturally, being a talk show and all. Some of the funniest bits in the show are Conan acknowledging quirky members of the studio audience, or gauging the amount of applause/cheering they provide. One particularly amusing moment was when the audience kept hooting and hollering at the start of the show, to which Conan replied:

* [[Stylistic Suck]]: Conan's Video Blog. Complete with all the awkward pauses, low-quality webcam resolution, and the best title screens Windows Movie Maker can provide. [[Invoked Trope|It was "designed" to reach out to his younger viewers]].

* [[Suicide as Comedy]]: Apparently, cows find hanging themselves from the set's rafters an effective way to commit suicide.

** On one episode, Conan delivered this monologue joke: "Oprah now has a half-sister, that’s a big story… Oprah says that when she was looking for advice on how to approach her half sister, she consulted Dr. Phil. Unfortunately, Dr. Phil wasn’t much help, because he’s a ''big dumb fraud''."

** A particularly pointed one came when President Obama went on ''[[The Tonight Show]]'' in October 2011. Conan's punchline:

** Conan continues to razz [[Kirstie Alley]] on his new show.

* [[Undesirable Prize]]: Andy has awarded audience members with "prizes" such as; a shoebox full of hair, a custom-made "World's Best Sex Offender" coffee mug, an [[So Bad It's Good|N.P.R. gun holster]], and [[Covered in Gunge|a jar filled with an unidentified whitish liquid, with a hand-written label reading "NUZZ"]].

* [[Visual Pun]]: Ever since [[Guns N' Roses|Slash]] made a guest appearance with the band any written out URL has had the forward slashes replaced with his face.

* [[The Voiceless]]: A running gag is how LaBamba never seems to talk when Conan addresses him during sketches, instead using gestures.

* [[We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties]]: The April 5, 2011 episode suffered this when the west coast feed of TBS aired 5 minutes of dead air, followed by about 20 minutes of commercials ([[Lampshaded]] the next day by Conan, who said they made a fortune), followed by the show airing completely out of order. A sketch on the following episode explained the "[[Deep South|reason]]" for the mix-up.

** During a skit in one episode, Conan and Andy lip synched to an imitation [[Morgan Freeman]] voiceover. Conan had planned to carry the voice over to announcing the guests as well, but just as he was about to announce the first guest's name, the machine that was providing the Morgan Freeman voice crashed and nothing was heard when Conan opened his mouth.

* [[Weird Moon]]: The huge moon in the background of his TBS show can be controlled via remote, and possibly be used to crush Andy Richter. It even has "that lunar wobble"!

* [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?]]: Conan has a remote-controlled moon as part of his studio. It is awesome.