Late Night Last Week: Conan O’Brien Visits Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney

By Will DiGravio  |  April 28, 2025 | 6:00pm
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Late Night Last Week: Conan O’Brien Visits Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney
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Every week, ​​​​Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. In this week’s late night TV recap, John Mulaney celebrates Conan, Jimmy Kimmel lands an interview with a viral sensation, and John Oliver dissects the threat of RFK Jr.

Late Night Last Week: John Mulaney Loves Conan (Just Like Us)

“He is an absolute hero of mine, and that’s the only genuine thing I’ll say because I won’t look him in the eye and say anything nice.” 

Such was how John Mulaney introduced Conan O’Brien, his first guest on the Wednesday, April 23 episode of Everybody’s Live. Last week’s episode functioned as the program’s Christmas special. Because the season will be over by December, Mulaney and crew figured why not celebrate now? O’Brien, with his red hair a la a young Kris Kringle, was the perfect guest. 

In last week’s column, we noted that Mulaney’s program is really hitting its stride. David Letterman even came by to kiss the man’s hand, as if blessing him as a successor to his late night throne. The man who serves as the most obvious linkage between Mulaney and Letterman is Conan. In fact, the host was unusually sincere about it on Wednesday. 

“[My show] is enormously indebted to yours,” Mulaney said, avoiding eye contact just as he promised. “Now that may embarrass you, but I was 11 when Late Night with Conan O’Brien came out and it was a huge moment for me.” 

Mulaney went on to remember a month-long bit the program did in trying to locate Whitman Mayo, the actor who played Grady on Sanford and Son. It took the program awhile to locate the actor, who eventually appeared on a Friday episode of the show. Mulaney said that he was sleeping over at a friend’s house when he realized that Mayo would appear on the program. When the friend revealed that they would not be watching Conan, Mulaney got up and ran.

“So I raced home in the night, to my house, to watch a 70-year-old character actor come out on your stage, while “Whoomp! (There It Is)” played,” Mulaney said. Conan seemed genuinely touched. 

“It’s really sweet to think about that,” he said, noting that because it was the 1990s, they did not know whether the show was resonating with people in the way one might know today given the immediacy of the network. “We were doing these weird things and mostly just getting scorn from the network.” 

“If anyone had told us there was an 11-year-old John Mulaney that approves of what we’re doing, I would have been so delighted,” O’Brien added. 

Jimmy Kimmel Interviews Viral Australian Twins

It was a quiet week in late night television. All the network shows, and even The Daily Show, were off. This gave the crew over at Jimmy Kimmel Live! the chance to secure a fantastic scoop. All you doomscrollers out there last week will likely have encountered Bridgette and Paula Powers, twins who speak in near perfect unison. The video that went viral featured the pair recounting a car-jacking that they had witnessed involving their mother, who, the pair told Kimmel is doing well. 

Kimmel had a chance to chat with the twins, who answered his questions in perfect unison. The pair have given interviews before, talking about how while they recognize it might at first be “weird” that they speak in tandem, they are comfortable and it is just how their brains work. The pair, who are also prolific conservationists, had fun with the whole thing on Kimmel. “We know that we annoy a lot of people out there,” they said. “But you know what? If they can’t stand hearing us talk how we do, they can just simply turn off the TV.” 

The crowd and Kimmel loved it. Bridgette and Paula shared that they are specifically focused on assisting pelicans. Kimmel asked if they had ever been to the United States. They said no, adding that they hoped to study pelican species here. Let’s hope Kimmel can make it happen. 

John Oliver on The Whole RFK Jr. Situation

And now for something way less fun. On the Sunday, April 27 episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver and his crew broke down the massive threat to public health and health research posed by the Trump Administrations Department of Health & Human Services, which is headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

For more than 36 minutes, Oliver didn’t seem to take a breathe as he weaved together all of the various threats posed by the RFK health regime, from cuts to research funding at the National Institutes of Health, to the firing of essential staff and in bringing so-called “vaccine skeptics,” some of whom are not even doctors, into the secretary’s inner circle. “Not only is he not a doctor, but he doesn’t even play one on TV,” Oliver said of one of the advisors. “Now more than ever, this is literally just some fucking guy.” 

Oliver’s gift for simultaneity remains astonishing. While maintaining just how easy it is to poke fun (brain worm jokes) and not take RFK Jr. and those who run in his orbit seriously, it is important to take them intensely seriously. “If you are thinking, this is all going to end badly, it’s already heading that way,” Oliver said, with an even more poignant and forceful sense of urgency than usual. 

“It feels right now, we’re all about to get a harsh lesson in what each part of our public health system does, as it gets taken away,” he said later. “Which is sort of like finding out what each of your organs does as someone removes them, one by one.” 

Will DiGravio is a Brooklyn-based critic, researcher, and late night comedy columnist, who first contributed to Paste in 2022. He’s been writing Paste’s late night TV recaps since 2024. He is an assistant editor at Cineaste, a GALECA member, and since 2019 has hosted The Video Essay Podcast. You can follow and/or unfollow him on Twitter and learn more about him via his website.

 
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