While you’re probably more familiar with Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, there’s another podcast from the Conanverse that you should really check out — if, for nothing else, the fact that it prompts Team Coco to release great vintage stand-up sets on YouTube, like the above clip of legendary one-liner genius Mitch Hedberg on Late Night With Conan O’Brien back in October 2004 (he died just a few months later, in March 2005). Titled Best of Stand-up From Conan, the Stitcher Premium podcast is hosted by stand-up and Conan writer Laurie Kilmartin and runs through — you guessed it — some of the best stand-up sets performed on O’Brien’s late-night shows over the years. The Hedberg set includes jokes on everything from Real World to robbing a bank with a BB gun (“Give me all your money or I’ll give you a dimple!”) to dreaming (“Sleeping is supposed to be a relaxing affair. I lay down on a bed and it feels great — next thing you know, I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord”) to arguably his most famous joke about getting a receipt for a doughnut: “We don’t need to bring ink and paper into this!”
Thanks to Kilmartin’s podcast, the Team Coco YouTube channel is now loaded with classic stand-up clips like the above, including performances from Maria Bamford, Norm Macdonald, Wanda Sykes, Paul F. Tompkins, Ray Romano, and David Cross. If you’ve already watched through all the old Conan remotes and other vintage clips like the episode with an audience made up entirely of children, consider these uploads your next old-school Conan binge.
