Clueless Gamer let Conan master his favorite game dunking on dorks

Conan O’Brien and Aaron Bleyaert in Clueless GamerScreenshot: YouTubeConan O’Brien doesn’t like video games. We know this because he declares it, with a certain edge of perverse pride, at the start of nearly every installment of his long-running Conan segment Clueless Gamer. Which might raise the question of why the recurring bit, in which O’Brien, producer Aaron Bleyaert, and a rotating band of celebrity guests play haplessly through the hottest video games of the day, has recurred more than 40 times over the course of the soon-to-conclude TBS series. The answer is easy to land on for anyone who’s spent much time with Conan, though: Few people make having a bad time look more fun than modern-era Conan O’Brien. Take it, maybe, as an evolution of the straight-man persona that saw O’Brien spend years feeding set-up lines to a menagerie of masturbating bears, angry little sisters, and racist ghosts on Late Night, a comic exasperation that only got more exasperated during the swift rise and fall (and final, Pyrrhic rise) of his run on NBC’s Tonight Show. Somewhere along the line, O’Brien got a lot more comfortable channeling his apparently limitless reserves of annoyance into comedy, whether in the form of the many pieces built around his irritations/interactions with employee (and ostensible friend) Jordan Schlansky, or in his confrontations with the medium of video gaming as a whole. Every segment of Clueless Gamer starts off roughly the same way: O’Brien introduces the game—usually culled from brand new titles proffered up by publishers operating on a probable “no such thing as bad publicity” mindset—with apparent enthusiasm, an illusion that persists until roughly the first time Bleyaert opens his mouth to begin talking about backstory or character creation or some other unfortunate distraction. O’Brien’s bored, mildly hateful looks toward camera begin early and often, followed by a little light verbal sniping, typically abetted by the celebrity guest. (Bill Hader, for instance, fell into the role of gleeful co-bully with abandon in the installment set around 2018 GOTY God Of War.)From there, we soon get O’Brien at his most joyfully withering, firing his TV-honed wit at anything and everything in range, from the writing, to the ludicrous violence on display, to—in what’s probably the funniest Clueless Gamer moment ever—his deep amusement at Kumail Nanjiani’s extremely Kumail Nanjiani-sounding voice in 2017’s Middle-earth: Shadow Of War. (“What was that?! O’Brien yells, as happy as audiences have ever seen him. “Did you do that over the phone?!”) If O’Brien’s playing up his annoyance or frustrations with whatever poor digital avatar has been thrust into his hands at the moment, he’s a genius for making it clear that both his ire, and his amusement, are coming from a genuine place.

#Conan #newsabc #newstodayfox #newstodaydonaldtrump #usanewstoday #newsworldtoday #