After departing his TBS series after 11 years back in 2021 and bringing an end to a nearly-30-year-run as a TV talk show host, Conan O’Brien has made a new onscreen splash in a big way through his “absurd” travel show Conan O’Brien Must Go, which recently premiered to Max subscribers on the 2024 TV schedule. Spinning out of his podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, the series sees the comedian traveling around the world to visit fans in their native countries, and as part of the promotional tour, he did an interview on Hot Ones that quickly went viral for his chaotic hijinks while he talked with host Sean Evans. Now O’Brien has explained what happened to his body after the interview, and it just goes to show why he’s our true comedy GOAT.
While kicking off the latest episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, the podcast host first joked about how after the Hot Ones interview was over, he spot welded girders at a construction site using hot sauce-induced fire coming out of his ass, and that there’s a “a building in the Mid-Wilshire district that's going up, and I think I did about 65 rivets in the building” after just 15 minutes of work. This then led into further joking about how he’d be the “world’s worst X-Man” as Ass-Weld, but eventually he shared that after appearing on Hot Ones, his eyes were “incredibly runny” and his mouth “really hurt.”
However, what O’Brien found especially “interesting” was what he discovered when examining his wedding ring after having rubbed his hands around in the hot sauce:
You wash your hands right afterwards, but some of the sauce got underneath my wedding ring. [Assistant] David Hopping was driving me home, and he was like, ‘Are you ok?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m fine!’ But I noticed that my wedding ring was burning… I took it off and I was like, 'Oh right, there's acid underneath it.'
In case you missed Conan O’Brien’s Hot Ones episode, to put it simply, he went went completely bonkers. Once he got to dipping the wings in the hotter sauces, rather than start taking it a little easy to cope with the added heat, O’Brien doubled down instead, not only eating all of the wings, but guzzling down some of these sauces by themselves and rubbing sauce on the nipples areas of his shirt. By the end of the interview, food was all over his face and clothes, and he’d gone into full-on rant mode.
So it’s no wonder his eyes, mouth and fingers felt the way they did later on, but it just showed us again how far O’Brien is willing to go for laughs. And hey, at least he avoided violently throwing up like Jennifer Lawrence unfortunately did. Watch the Hot Ones episode below to experience the entirety of this hilarious insanity:
During the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend intro, O’Brien also talked about how some of his friends saw his name trending on X/Twitter after his Hot Ones appearance and were worried he’d died, as well as how Dr. Arroyo, the incompetent physician who would periodically check on him during the Hot Ones interview, was played by comedy writer José Arroyo. It’s hard to imagine any Hot Ones episodes getting more unhinged than O’Brien’s, unless of course he ever returns to the show. If that happens, I can’t begin to imagine how he’d up his game, but I will certainly welcome seeing it should that day come.
As for Conan O’Brien Must Go, our own Sarah El-Mahmoud enjoyed it immensely and would like more seasons of the travel show to be made. If Max greenlights those, we’ll let you know. You can also watch the older show Conan Without Borders on the same streaming service.
