Paul Rudd pulls his famous Mac and Me prank on Conan one last time. Former Simpsons and SNL writer Conan O’Brien earned his first talk show gig when he took over NBC’s Late Night from David Letterman in 1993. In 2010 he would be promoted to the more prestigious Tonight Show slot, only to be usurped by a returning Jay Leno just a few months later.
While the drama over O’Brien’s brief ascension to the most coveted of all late night talk show slots became the stuff of TV legend, O’Brien himself left the cutthroat network world behind for cable, launching Conan on TBS in 2010. Later in the decade Conan would undergo a major format change, switching from a traditional hour-long show to a half-hour focused on a single interview. Now O’Brien is leaving Conan behind to launch a new endeavor on HBO Max, and has spent the last few weeks celebrating the end of his TBS run with appearances by many of his most popular guests from over the years.
A great argument could indeed be had over which celebrity has been the best O’Brien guest in the decades since he became a talk show host. The short list would certainly have to include Bill Hader, who returned last night for one more appearance. In the middle of Hader’s interview, another of O’Brien’s greatest guests dropped in to unleash the bit O’Brien fans have been waiting for ever since the end of Conan was announced. See (presumably) the last performance of the world famous Rudd Mac and Me prank in the space below (via Team Coco):
Rudd first began pranking O’Brien by showing a clip from the infamously bad 1988 E.T. knockoff Mac and Me back in 2004. The bit quite simply involves Rudd mysteriously showing a certain scene from Mac and Me, involving a young boy in a wheelchair plunging off a cliff, in place of the clip he’s expected to show. Over the years, Rudd has returned to promote other projects on O’Brien’s shows, only to pull out his favorite Mac and Me moment. Last night, Rudd “crashed” Hader’s interview to argue with him about an SNL sketch that went wrong and of course, in a very convoluted chain of events, ended up showing Mac and Me. Later while discussing the famed gag, Rudd admitted he has considered changing up the clip over the years only to return to the Mac and Me well.
It would clearly have been a shame had O’Brien wrapped up Conan without bringing Rudd back to play his Mac and Me joke one last time. When it comes to running gags on late night shows, it’s hard to top Rudd’s almost two-decade-long run of weirdly calling back to an otherwise forgotten late ‘80s family sci-fi film in place of promoting the actual thing he's supposed to promote. The gag indeed is a great example of the kind of random and weird humor that was always a hallmark of O’Brien’s shows. It also affords Rudd a chance to show off his impeccable deadpan humor skills. Extra kudos to Hader for being a good enough sport to play along, since his whole interview is basically just a set up for Rudd’s last Conan pranking.
Source: Team Coco