Conan Turned One Chinese Food Delivery Into Peak New York Chaos
Today’s Wednesday Motivation is less “rise and grind” and more: be six-foot-four, wander Manhattan with somebody else’s dinner, and somehow turn complete incompetence into television history.
We are throwing it back to Conan O’Brien delivering Chinese food in New York City during CONAN’s 2011 return to his old stomping grounds. Team Coco originally posted the remote on November 1, 2011, and the premise could not have been simpler: Conan missed New York, loved the fact that Chinese food could seemingly appear anywhere in minutes, and decided he should experience the glamorous life of the person actually delivering it.
Which brings us to the question INYIM apparently failed to ask in 2011: how did we not notice what a tall daddy Conan was? The man is famously around 6-foot-4, all legs, shoulders, red hair and deeply committed nonsense, stomping through downtown Manhattan like an Irish-American streetlamp that has suddenly become sentient.
television
Conan On The Job, Before Everything Became Content
This is exactly why Conan’s remotes still hit: one stupid premise, actual strangers, and eight minutes of beautiful social collapse.
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The remote begins at a busy Chinese restaurant where Conan immediately does what Conan does best: inserts himself into a functioning workplace and becomes everybody’s problem. He answers the phone, loses interest in taking an order, announces that he has a delivery and heads into the street with food that absolutely should not have been entrusted to him.
The first office delivery goes spectacularly badly. Security will not simply send him upstairs, the customer does not want to be on camera, and Conan — still insisting “I am the delivery guy” — eventually finds himself standing outside with the food while another person reportedly throws coffee at him. His assessment back on the street: basically, welcome back to New York.
Does he learn from that first failure? Of course not. He keeps moving, asks strangers for directions, starts giving pieces of the delivery away because the bag is getting heavy and then gets completely derailed after meeting a group of Argentine women drinking mate.
Conan takes a sip through the metal straw, is told it is basically an Argentine green tea and immediately asks whether it is marijuana. Minutes later, walking in the wrong direction, he decides there definitely had to be something in the tea. This is not investigative journalism. It is exactly why the remote works.
By this point he has also given away most of the original Chinese food. Faced with the tiny problem of having an actual customer waiting for an actual order, Conan stops at a Thai restaurant, buys three soups as replacement food and carries on as though substituting an entirely different cuisine is simply the natural next step in professional delivery logistics.
The final stop gives the whole ridiculous segment a strangely sweet landing. Conan meets the women waiting for the order, admits that he gave their food away, presents the Thai soup instead and ends up telling them that they took a bad day and made it fantastic — and that they represent what he loves about New York City.
That is the secret sauce of the old Conan remotes. He could be obnoxious, wildly inappropriate for the assigned job and physically impossible to miss, but the joke was usually on him. He entered real spaces, let real people throw him off balance and followed whatever weird human interaction appeared next.
And watching it now, another truth arrives approximately fifteen years late: young-ish Conan was kind of a babe. Tall daddy, giant coat, endless legs, that ridiculous pompadour. We were so busy laughing at him that apparently nobody at INYIM headquarters was doing the necessary visual research.
Wednesday motivation achieved: walk tall, commit to the bit, and if you accidentally give away somebody’s dinner, apparently buy them Thai soup and keep moving.
Watch Conan O’Brien Deliver Chinese Food in NYC on CONAN
Team Coco’s 2011 remote follows Conan through downtown New York as his attempt at Chinese food delivery goes progressively, gloriously off the rails.
Source: Team Coco / CONAN on TBS.
