Conan O’Brien made his grand return to The Tonight Show, where he admitted that it was “weird” to be back.
The comedian appeared as a guest on Tuesday night’s (April 9) taping to promote his new Max series Conan O’Brien Must Go. After current host Jimmy Fallon delivered his introduction, O’Brien playfully scolded the audience for their prolonged standing ovation.
“I know you mean well, but I had The Tonight Show for 10 minutes and you just ate into my time!” he said. “This is all the time I have. Knock it off!”
O’Brien briefly hosted The Tonight Show for seven months in 2010 before getting fired and replaced by Jay Leno in what could be described as a super messy exit. While there were no signs of tension or awkwardness in his return, he did confess that it was “weird to come back.”
“I haven’t been in this building for such a long time, and I haven’t been on this floor in forever,” he told Fallon during the broadcast.
But before his short-lived tenure on The Tonight Show, O’Brien famously hosted the Late Night show from 1993 to 2009.
“You have strange memories,” he said. “I mean, I was here for 16 years doing the Late Night show before we went out to L.A., and right across the hall — all these memories came flooding back to me.”
These days, as the guest pointed out, Kelly Clarkson‘s self-titled daytime talk show is housed in what was once his Late Night studio.
“I love Kelly Clarkson. Who doesn’t love Kelly Clarkson? But still I felt like, ‘It’s not right! Blasphemy! They should’ve burned it to the ground,’” he joked. “And then Kelly came out to say hi and I said, ‘Don’t talk to me! You make me sick!’ I feel terrible, Kelly, I really do.”
O’Brien’s firing from The Tonight Show came after NBC suggested pushing his time slot back to accommodate an earlier airtime for the Jay Leno Show. At the time, he released a lengthy statement pushing back against the decision.
“For 60 years the Tonight Show has aired immediately following the late local news,” he wrote. “I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show.”
After O’Brien left, Leno ended up hosting the long-running talk show until he retired in 2014 and passed the torch to Fallon, who has hosted ever since.
