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

In early 2004, some corporate merger gave NBC royalty-free access to every episode of Walker, Texas Ranger ever. The result was absolutely depraved: O’Brien became so mad with power that he installed a lever on his set that, when pulled, brought up a completely decontextualized clip from Chuck Norris’ long-running, strangely moralistic modern Western series. Walker had always been funny, but hadn’t yet been exploited for its memetic potential, providing a rich vein of bad-TV yucks for O’Brien to mine. In this early installment, we have a ludicrously over-the-top action scene (“First off, when a guy’s on fire, do you have to kick him out of the window?”), a shot of Walker icily staring down a computer animation of DNA, and a death scene that defies gravity. But it was O’Brien’s application of the lever—lording it over the viewer, teasing it, treating it as punishment—that made the joke so enduringly enjoyable. Wait till the end—when Conan unexpectedly pulls the lever while introducing a guest—for proof. [Clayton Purdom]