A late-night mystery! Conan O’Brien was shocked after discovering that the set of his talk show had been burglarized — and even more surprised by what the robber stole.
The comedian, 57, has been filming Conan at the Largo Theater in Los Angeles amid the coronavirus pandemic in hopes of helping to “revive” the historic building. On Monday, October 26, O’Brien revealed that “someone broke into our little theater” and swiped a few key items for the late-night show’s production.
“We got robbed, Andy! Robbed!” the Massachusetts native cried from behind his desk as sidekick Andy Richter shook his head in disappointment. “Whoever broke in here had to stare [at] what I think is about 350 cardboard cutouts of exuberant fans in the eyes and say, ‘Hey don’t mind me. I’m going to steal some s–t.”
Richter, 53, joked, “You would have thought that the minute they came in and saw ‘Conan’ on anything, they would have been like, ‘No, come on. He’s one of the good guys. Let’s go break into someone else’s [set].'”
When the former Tonight Show host asked a nearby producer what equipment had been stolen, he couldn’t cover up his sheer disbelief. The team arrived on set on Monday morning to learn that their laptops, which are used for Zoom interviews with celebrity guests, had vanished, along with the film crew’s slate.
“That’s the lowest,” O’Brien teased. “I can’t think of anything lower. OK, the laptops fine. You took the slate? That’s crazy.”
As the Saturday Night Live alum lamented the loss of some of his show’s most essential items, he realized that no other late-night hosts would ever experience the same type of problem.
“Look at us! What happened to us?” he asked. “This kind of s–t isn’t happening to other big-time late-night shows. No one breaks into The Tonight Show and steals all the equipment. What happened to us? We’ve become this garage band that drives around. We’ve got our van and we parked it in an alley, and someone broke in and took our amps. What is that? This doesn’t happen to the other talk show hosts. This would never happen to [Jimmy] Kimmel or [Jimmy] Fallon or any of those guys.”
Despite hitting a “new low” in his show’s 10-year history, O’Brien couldn’t help but laugh at the unfortunate circumstance, holding his head in his hands as he reflected on how his career got to this point.
“Just for the laugh alone, maybe it’s worth it,” he teased. “Suddenly this show that I’ve been working on for 27 years is … a 1995 Nissan Sentra and they took the air conditioning right out of it.”
