Conan O’Brien is a TV host, producer, and infamous comedian who’s been in his current position on TBS’s late-night show Conan since 2010. He covers world and celebrity news with a comedic slant like any other late talk show, but in the last few years he’s begun to feature gaming segments a great deal. His Clueless Gamer bit invites a couple celebrities and/or athletes to play new and upcoming video games, usually quite poorly to the delight of viewers. One of the more popular episodes featured football players Marshawn Lynch and Rob Gronkowski reacting to the gruesome fatalities of Mortal Kombat X. Conan’s latest gaming journey takes him into the world of virtual reality at YouTube’s VR labs, and it makes for another hilarious encounter.
The video debuted last week but, in case you missed it, it is certainly worth a good laugh. O’Brien is initially introduced to room-scale VR via one of the coolest ways to date: Tilt Brush. Back in September, artist SUTU was commissioned to show the world what Tilt Brush was capable of and did so with incredible art of varying styles in a 4-part funhouse. When O’Brien switches the program’s setting to outer space he states that “this is going to put the marijuana industry out of business” and then moves on to do a pretty admirable job drawing for his first time in the program (unless there’s some camera-cut trickery in play). After, he moves on to a couple simulations.
First up he’s dropped into Job Simulator and immediately goes for the coffee maker, as we all would. He fails and proceeds to antagonize an adjacent cubicle mate before moving on to a different type of job: Chef. Not fully grasping the tools available to him, O’Brien attempts to serve whole ingredients to customers without preparing actual meals which leads to a hilarious and heated exchanged with his floating computer monitor waiter. That argument ends with him declaring “this could be more pornographic”, a sentiment he echoes often throughout the video. Lastly, he is thrown into a boxing simulator.
The bit s a treat to watch and will hopefully spark a bit of curiosity in his audience, even if it is doesn’t fully inspire confidence in the technology.
