Tina Fey Berated Conan O’Brien for Humiliating Her Husband

At a recent Saturday Night Live event, Conan O’Brien ran into Tina Fey and her husband, composer, comedian and Second City alum Jeff Richmond. While Richmond has won multiple Emmys and scored a Tony nomination for his prodigious musical work, O’Brien remembers him for something else: a bare-chested bit on his late-night show back in 2001. 

Richmond is “very brilliant” and “incredibly successful,” O’Brien told Amy Poehler this week on his Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast. But in his mind’s eye, O’Brien only sees Richmond “in a diaper hanging on a rope with a bow and arrow, you know, and some glitter in his hair and no shirt. And he is just spinning at rehearsal, awkwardly.”

O’Brien said he had no idea who Richmond was at the time — just another bit player hired for a comedy sketch — but he found out when Tina Fey stopped by the studio. She was about to make her first appearance on Conan’s show and wasn’t happy when she saw what was happening. “Tina passed a monitor and she went, ‘That’s my husband, you fucker. What have you done to him?’”

The two joked about it during Fey’s actual appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. She revealed that she was recently engaged to be married, and Conan wanted to know all about the lucky guy. “He’s an actor, and he’s actually done a few bits on your show. He actually did one this week,” Fey explained. 

Cut to Richmond in his diaper. “This is who I’m marrying,” she admitted as her Cupid beau read through a laundry list of sexually transmitted diseases. “Me and him gonna make a baby someday!” (The prophecy came true — Fey and Richmond have two daughters.)

Despite Fey’s admonition, O’Brien has no regrets about a topless Richmond humiliating himself in a diaper on national television. “I don’t care what he does,” O’Brien told Poehler. “He’ll get an Oscar for scoring something, and I’ll still think, ‘Heh heh — you a Cupid.’”