Conan O’Brien’s Friends Thought He Actually Died During ‘Hot Ones’

After Conan O’Brien consumed the hottest hot wings on the planet and rubbed sauce on his nipples as milk-colored spittle dribbled on his dress shirt, his friends were just grateful that his last words weren’t, “Why can’t I feel anything?”

On April 12th, the popular talk show/celebrity torture series Hot Ones posted an episode featuring the legendary late-night host that quickly consumed the internet’s attention for a full week following the release. Conan’s unhinged persona predictably paired well with the most painful and intense hot sauces First We Feast could source, and his explosive, entertaining and quotable performance while facing the Wings of Death exposed the 61-year-old star of Conan O’Brien Must Go to a new audience of Zoomers who pored through all of the best clips from his long TV career on Twitter in the aftermath of the episode. 

As many Conan fans pointed out, the level of exposure and adoration that O’Brien received on social media following the Hot Ones incident would have made anyone out of the loop on his hot-sauce meltdown think that he had passed away and was being eulogized by Twitter. In fact, some folks in Conan’s life even reached out to him during the height of the craze just to confirm that he was still kicking. 

“I had a bunch of friends who saw my name all over Twitter, and the first assumption is, ‘He’s dead,’” O’Brien explained on a recent episode of his podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, “(Conan’s wife) Liza got into another relationship immediately.”

“If I think something’s funny, I’ll do it and deal with it later,” Conan said of the comedic approach that inspired him not just to complete the most daunting culinary challenge in entertainment media, but to drink hot sauce straight from the bottle, rub it all over his hands and massage it into his nipples. Said Conan, “I was dealt with later.”

Thankfully, Conan’s co-stars on Conan O'Brien Needs a Friends, Sona Movsesian and Matt Gourley, asked the burning questions we’ve all wanted to ask of every celebrity who has taken the Hot Ones challenge when they inquired about their boss’ bowel movements in the wake of his meltdown. O’Brien’s answer: “After I ingested all that, I wanted it to be useful. So I found a construction site where they were doing spot welding, and I went there and I said, ‘Gentlemen, if you want, I can weld these girders for you in, I’m guessing, about 15 minutes. You’ll need to avert your eyes because I’ll be dropping my pants.’”

“There’s a building in the mid-Wilshire district that’s going up, and I think I did about 65 rivets in the building. And people were driving by saying, ‘Conan O’Brien, his pants are around his ankles, and I think fire is shooting out of his ass and he’s welding a building!’” O’Brien said of his post-Hot Ones excretions. “That way everybody wins! There’s a building — and, trust me, that section of the building will never fall. They’ve had an engineer say, ‘Whoever did this, these are heat signatures we’ve never seen!’”