Reel Rundown: ‘Delightfully idiotic’ show lets viewers travel alongside Conan O’Brien and friends

When asked on the YouTube interview show “Hot Ones” what he expects people to get from his new streaming travelogue series “Conan O’Brien Must Go,” the former late-night-television host responds in his usual comedic manner.

“My mission,” he tells “Hot Ones” host Sean Evans, “is that you learn nothing about the country. My job is that you know less about the country after I’m done than when I started.”

Maybe the best headline of all the show’s reviews is the one that calls it “delightfully idiotic.” But, then, idiocy has been O’Brien’s trademark comic style since he broke away from his writing duties at “Saturday Night Live” in 1991 and, a couple of years later, took over his late-night-TV chores.

Whether with Andy Richter at his side, sparring with a gaggle of guests or now on his weekly podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” O’Brien traditionally has depended on the kind of sophomoric, self-deprecating humor that even Jerry Lewis might have avoided.

Not that the late Lewis was ever big on self-deprecation.

Making himself the butt of jokes, though, is one of O’Brien’s great strengths. Even at his most juvenile, O’Brien can make many of us laugh. And in his new show, the first season of which is streaming on Max, he’s as funny as ever.

This isn’t the first travel show that he’s done. In 2015, he began filming “Conan Without Borders” (also available on Max), which over two seasons took him to 13 countries, from Cuba to Ghana, in as many episodes. The series was forced to cease production during the coronavirus pandemic.

Now he’s back, and the new series’ first four episodes take him to, in order, Norway, Argentina, Thailand and Ireland. In an inspired, if demented touch, every episode begins with the hangdog German filmmaker Werner Herzog sermonizing about how beautiful the Earth is.

It’s so beautiful, Herzog insists, that the only way we humans can truly appreciate it is by defiling it. And then he introduces O’Brien as the perfect “defiler,” a man “with the eyes of a crudely painted doll.”

One of the show’s running gags is that O’Brien features people who have shown up on his weekly podcast. Among them are Jarle the Norwegian rapper, Sebastian the Argentinian artist, a Thai woman Anna who’s into indoor rock climbing and his biggest Irish-Pakistani fan Mohammed.

With or without his fans in tow, O’Brien explores the four countries like a dazed (often because of jet lag) and dumb American, dressing in local garb that makes him look ridiculous. He also engages in local habits such as pretending to be a Norwegian Viking or an Argentinian gaucho, and fantasizing that he can defeat a whole team of Muay Thai fighters. He even sings live on a Bangkok television show.

And while some people might consider what O’Brien does an afront to the cultures he is exploring, again, he himself – the perpetual clown – is always the focus of the joke.

As Herzog says in his trademark Germanic drone, “This is madness. This is lunacy. This is chaos. This is ‘Conan O’Brien Must Go.’ ”

I’d close with a note to cue the canned laughter. But that would be unnecessary. My laughs are for real.