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

There was something wonderful about the way Conan was able to subvert late-night conventions, by not just shooting spitballs at Leno’s formulas but creating perversions of them. Case in point: “Actual Items,” which poked fun at Leno’s famous recurring “Headlines” segment. The joke, at least initially, was that Conan’s “pulled from the papers” oddities were completely fabricated, unlike Leno’s. But O’Brien also turned it into its own fucked-up thing entirely, creating marketing copy that pivoted organically into violence, surreality, and sex. This early installment, from March 1997, features a VCR that shoots cream, a suicidal dog, genocidal cashews, a disemboweled Easter Bunny, and a bunch of other boorish and depraved punch lines. By the time they get to a baby advertising a strip club, it’s clear that O’Brien’s repeated claims that “you can’t make this up” aren’t entirely serious, but rather a springboard for his team to exercise its own dark humor. [Clayton Purdom]