Walker, Slipnutz, and baseball: 11 essential Late Night With Conan O’Brien clips

This article originally ran in 2018. We’re re-running it in honor of Conan’s final episode, which airs Thursday, June 24 at 11 p.m. EST on TBS.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the debut of Late Night With Conan O’Brien. NBC rolled the dice on the veteran Simpsons and Saturday Night Live writer, plucking him from relative obscurity to take over for no less a luminary than David Letterman. But after a famously rocky start, the series became a springboard for ’90s alt-comedy talent and turned its endlessly sardonic host into a late-night legend. To commemorate its 14-season, 2,725-episode run, here are a handful of The A.V. Club’s favorite clips, which are just as surprising, subversive, and silly today as they were when they first aired.

1864 Baseball

Conan himself the remote segment where he played baseball as it would have been played back in 1864 as his favorite on-air moment in a 2012 interview with Piers Morgan, and it’s hard to disagree. Conan’s remote segments are often the best part of any particular episode—see also on the streets of Mexico City last year—but that particular field trip really played to his strengths, as it allowed him to simultaneously get into goofball character wearing a bushy old-timey mustache and play the self-depreciating straight man in interviews with the historical re-enactors on his team. Unabashed silliness and deep nerdery? Sounds like peak Conan. [Katie Rife]