Conan O'Brien no longer has to fill time with "perfunctory nipple play" thanks to his new half-hour format

Vulture

The revamped Conan lets Conan O'Brien do what he wants -- not what he has to do to fill time. "The thing that made me saddest about old Conan was the perfunctory nipple play," says Bethy Squires. "Every night, the band would play O’Brien on and he’d cap it off with rubbing his nips," says Squires. "Sometimes he’d invite an audience member to give them a tweak. And if it was a man, eight times out of ten they’d pinch really hard and O’Brien would complain. Every night, O’Brien would perform this nipple ritual (niptual?) with the cold dead eyes of Emma Stone massaging the queen’s legs in The Favourite. I would hide my head behind a pillow for what felt like hours every night, waiting for it to be over. Now that the show is shorter (and bandless), O’Brien doesn’t have time to joylessly fondle himself forever — 20 seconds tops, sometimes no time at all! But that doesn’t mean the show feels cramped. On the contrary, because so much extraneous business has been cleared from the docket, what’s left has a lot of time to breathe."