Recently, Team Coco has been unearthing vintage Conan O’Brien interview clips to pay tribute to stars after their deaths like Terry Jones, James Lipton, and Jerry Stiller. Following the news that comedy legend Carl Reiner died this week at age 98, another old clip was uploaded to the Team Coco YouTube channel: Reiner’s very first appearance on Late Night With Conan O’Brien back in 1995. In the clip, Reiner begins his appearance by attempting to, as he puts it, “stake out the territory the way the coyotes do” by briefly walking around O’Brien’s set and pretending to pee on the walls. After Reiner is sufficiently comfortable with his new “territory,” he and O’Brien chat about The Dick Van Dyke Show as well as the original version of the series that Reiner starred in. “Somebody noticed that I wasn’t as good at playing me as somebody else could be,” Reiner said. But it all worked out: “If we hadn’t gotten Dick Van Dyke, you wouldn’t be inviting me to your place today to stake out my territory.”
If you want some more quality Reiner-O’Brien content, another great moment between the two happened over 20 years later, in 2017, when Reiner showered O’Brien with praise for his ridiculous “Nut Spoon” sketch. “I taped it. I laughed so hard. You idiots, with the nut spoon!” Reiner said, calling it “the best sketch I’ve seen in a long time.” “I can’t believe, (a) you saw it, (b) you liked it, and (c) you’re showing it to other people,” O’Brien told Reiner at the time. “Makes my life.” Check out the clip, as well as the sketch Reiner loved so dearly, below:
