Hilarious, defiant and unabashedly weird: Conan O’Brien hasn’t lost an iota of his underdog brilliance

After three decades on air, the comedian has a new travel show. For comedy nerds, he remains their guy on the inside

Like Buster Keaton, Gene Kelly, and Jackie Chan before him, Conan O’Brien shows his genius in his adaptivity, the ability to insert himself into any setting and incorporate its material into the contours of his act. He gave a tour-de-force demonstration during his recent, instantly viral, appearance on Hot Ones, where he treated the show’s premise – guests eat chicken wings while answering questions – as a jumping-off point for his own anarchic brand of comedy. He brought along his longtime staff writer José Arroyo in character as “Dr Arroyo”, an incompetent yet affordable physician on hand to ensure that O’Brien’s gentle Irish constitution could withstand all the spice. After finishing each hot wing, O’Brien stashed the bones in his pocket until it bulged to capacity, at which point he started stuffing them in Dr Arroyo’s lab coat. He maintained his composure admirably through the escalating Scoville spiciness scores, only to hit a sudden wall on the penultimate wing and swiftly lose his mind. Expelling rivers of phlegm and drooling mouthfuls of milk, he then delivered a manic yet moving grand-finale soliloquy on the beauty of humor coming from anywhere.

Like so many of O’Brien’s finest moments, it was unabashedly weird, hysterically funny, and sneakily poignant.