So we're just going to show the cold open?
[Crew Member] Well, you do the setup.
(beep) (hand slapping)
Aha!
Your shoulder's gotten soft.
Hasn't been slapped and slapped for 15 months.
That's right. It healed.
(beep)
You're still getting all of this, right?
(upbeat music)
Hey, Conan O'Brien here for another edition
of Behind the Nonsense.
This is where we explore some of the tomfoolery
behind the scenes, how things got made,
and we discuss very loosely how it all happened
with the people who made it happen.
And I'm sitting here with two terrific writers,
Jesse Gaskell, hey, Jessie.
Hey, Conan.
Jose Arroyo.
Hey, Conan.
And you seemed uncomfortable.
I was just saying, "Hey, Conan."
Okay. I love to try and make him...
Should we take it again?
No, we're gonna stick with that. I love that.
"Hey, Conan."
Anyway, I don't mean to embarrass you,
but you're excellent writers and you have come with me
on every single travel show.
Whenever we go anywhere in the world
for Conan Without Borders,
this is a core of my writing team,
along with Mr. Mike Sweeney.
We're gonna talk now about the cold open
for the Mexico show.
Yes.
We went to Mexico City and we did a show.
And just to set the table,
Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.
He said he was gonna build a wall
and Mexico would pay for it.
It stirred up, I think, a lot of xenophobia
about Mexico and the border.
And so this is 2017 and we decided
we should go to Mexico City and do a show
and do it with the help of the Mexican people
who work in the television industry.
So this was the cold open to that show.
Why don't we show it then we'll talk about it?
Sure.
And the show in general. Let's take a look.
(upbeat music)
(audience clapping)
(Mexican trumpet music)
(audience laughing)
(audience cheering)
Hi.
Buenos tardes. Pasaporte.
Oh, yeah.
(audience laughing)
There you go.
(audience laughing)
It's O'Brien. Conan O'Brien, I'm him.
(audience laughing)
The comedian.
TV host. Doing a big show in Mexico City.
Check it out.
(audience laughing)
(man speaking Spanish)
[Officer] Could you please step out of line, sir?
Uh, okay.
We have a new policy.
Americans are subject to extreme vetting.
Extreme vetting?
You might just be one of those bad hombres.
(audience laughing)
Look, I see what you're doing, all right?
We got some new people running the United States
and that's created some tension between our countries,
but you can't lump all Americans into one group.
It's not fair. It's stereotyping.
(officers laughing) (audience laughing)
(man speaking Spanish)
(audience laughing)
(Conan laughing nervously)
Bienvenido a Mexico.
Gracias. Thank you so much.
(dog growling)
(dramatic music)
Okay, that's my favorite sunscreen.
I wasn't sure if you guys would have good Mexican food.
(audience groaning)
I stayed there like 15 years ago, okay?
And I stole the towel.
(dog growling)
That is yours to keep and I'll just see myself
through the border.
This is a great, great gate.
(dog barking)
(Mexican trumpet music)
(audience applauding)
Okay, I don't know if you can see all the way to the end,
but I don't know if that's the take
where the dog actually got me?
Is that the take?
Yes, yes.
Well, that's what we were just reminiscing fondly about.
I was told, I think, to get down before the dog gets me,
but I always like to go for it.
And I'm pretty sure that dog chomped me on the thigh?
Yeah. Well, that was a real police dog.
I mean, that's a, like a Belgian Malinois?
Is that the...
I don't know. I didn't hire the dog.
I would've assumed you would've gotten a non-lethal dog,
but you're looking to me for like,
"That was the lethal dog that we got, right?"
That's you who got the dog.
They were trained and you were supposed to run.
The dog was gonna chase you and you were supposed
to stop at a certain point, but I think...
Well, when a killing dog is chasing you,
hard to stop as it nears, but...
And it broke the skin. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it did break the skin
and I remembered walking back and tore the pants leg
and so I saw blood and torn pants leg, and I thought...
And we had other pants, so that was fine.
Yeah, what you care? Yeah.
For us, that's political, about as political as we get,
because we don't often do political humor,
but it was such a charged atmosphere.
And actually something we like to do
with a lot of the Conan Without Borders shows
is flip the script so that I'm the American in this case,
like the gringo is the interloper.
So the power position's been switched
and so I thought it was a really good idea that you guys had
that I'm trying to get into Mexico and they're harassing me,
the way people thought we were harassing
Mexicans who were trying to come
and so there was a real nice simplicity to it,
but then we go to silly jokes that make fun of me.
And the joke really is all the way through on me,
which is the kind of stuff I like to do.
Exactly. Exactly.
And you took advantage of that charged atmosphere,
you know, from the politics at the time.
So all we had to do was, you know,
give the same lines that Trump was saying
to the Mexican guards.
They're not sending us their best or things like that.
And of course, it got a great reaction.
Yeah, we shot it at Televisa in Ciudad de Mexico
and everyone who worked on it was fantastic.
[Jose] Yes.
I mean, they helped us.
It was important to me that we got to do it
with the help of Mexican television makers
and executives and camera operators.
Yes.
And so that was fun to show that cold open
to that audience.
They got a huge kick out of it, again.
Yeah and then they watched me do a monologue in Spanish.
All in Spanish.
And I remembered you backstage, you running,
'cause you're fluent.
Yes.
You just running it with me over and over and over again
so that my accent was better,
my pronunciation was a little more fluent,
because I really wanted to earn the laughs in Spanish.
And so that ended up working out.
(Conan speaking Spanish)
(audience laughing)
You did four or five monologue jokes,
the same stuff that you do on, you know,
in the US show and your phonetic pronunciation was great.
It came out really good.
You know, I also think there's something that's happened,
I noticed it with this piece, which is,
we were really able to take advantage of this
when we moved to Los Angeles.
We did all those years in New York and made all this comedy
that I'm really proud of, not all of it, but a lot of it.
(Jesse laughing)
Let's be honest, it's a numbers game.
But when we came here to Los Angeles
and the locations that we can get are so cinematic,
and that was one of the things that I counted on
when we came out here.
I didn't even know that drones were gonna be a thing,
but the drone shots that we can get.
And so it's that Breaking Bad look
and we have excellent camera technicians
and cameramen and people who know
how to make things look amazing.
They can always match these looks
and you guys were always meticulous, storyboarding things,
and so to pull people into the reality
of a situation like that,
you really do feel like I'm walking across the desert
and you're looking at a legitimate piece of filmmaking,
rather than the cold open to, you know, a nightly show,
so that, I think, was something that I was proud of.
I do feel bad about rubbing ham on the back of your pants.
(Jesse laughing)
You told me it was your good luck ritual.
Yeah, and the dog...
You always have ham.
Jose really does have little leather pouches.
He'll wait until we're sitting in traffic
on a bus or something and then he'll...
On a travel show.
Very obviously pull one out of his backpack,
because it's almost like the red flag in front of the bull.
Because it enrages Conan to see
these tiny little things that I sometime have.
He has a very Euro-centric sensibility
and he has lots of little tiny pouches and leather cases,
and he has fine little pens and pencils,
and he has little sketching pads,
and you've never seen anything like them before,
unless you were raised in Holland
and he'll pull out this little pouch and he'll open it up
and there's one little nectarine wedge
that he keeps in there.
And then he'll go, like, "Mm, mm."
And then like, "Mm, just enough. Not too much, just enough."
And then he'll zip it up again.
And I always wanted to throw you out the bus window.
Yes, exactly.
And I think several times I did.
(upbeat music)
Have this sold on eBay, please.
Absolutely.
That's my saliva.
Hello? Oh, Spielberg.
Excuse me.