Conan O’Brien gives Atlanta much love

That dichotomy was in full force last night on his final “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on TV Tour” date at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. He blended songs with clips and jokes about his plight, noting that this is the first time people had ever paid to see him and he had hopes the audience would “sorta” enjoy him.

Grade the Conan stage show

On video, he showed himself 100 pounds overweight, laying at home reeking of urine, placing peanut butter on his toes for his dog to lick off – until the idea of a 42-city stage tour came to pass.

Sure, he's not a musician, but he loves to sing and play guitar, which he did liberally, picking his favorite songs, including the Cake version of the Gloria Gaynor classic "I Will Survive," a metaphor for his life the past few months.

He asked for potential groupies to stand up. One looked frighteningly like Conan, which he found deeply amusing – as did the rest of us.

As he has in other cities, he also brought on stage a couple of locals to pull the "Walker, Texas Ranger" lever, which he renamed the "Chuck Norris handle" since NBC now has the "intellectual property" to his bits. Boxer Evander Holyfield showed up, showed he had no particular wit, then left the stage. Former Conyers resident and "30 Rock" star Jack McBrayer also popped by for a couple of minutes:

The writers did throw in some funny Atlanta references for Conan, the best of which was Andy Richter providing an "advertisement" for the legendary Clermont Lounge, which he noted "has been around since the 1950s and so have the dancers." Triumph the Insult Dog showed up on video, where the writers deliberately inserted poorly edited Atlanta references into the puppet dog's mouth, including the Thrashers, the Varsity and Monica Pearson.

He told the crowd he wasn't going to mention anybody by name who might have screwed him. Someone conveniently yelled "Jay Leno sucks!" He responded with his deliberately bad imitation of Leno, then said he was actually aping Ludacris.

The stage show came about partly because of NBC’s mismanagement. The network six years ago decided to give “The Tonight Show” to Conan in 2009 in hopes for a smooth transition between him and Jay Leno. But Leno last year was still on top in the ratings, and NBC decided to move Leno to prime time so he wouldn’t bolt.

Sadly, Leno didn’t translate well in prime time, the affiliates balked and Conan was unable to keep much of Leno’s fans. Given just a few months, though, Conan wasn’t given much of a chance to build his audience either and was told earlier this year he could move to 12:05 a.m.to accommodate Leno moving back to 11:35 p.m. Conan said no.

He ended up with a monstrous bundle of cash but was unable to be on TV for several months. To give his fans a way to see him at least once, he decided to embark on this tour, which more or less sold out with a single Tweet and not a penny in marketing.

In the end, he landed a new talk-show gig at Atlanta’s TBS this November. On stage, he gave kudos to TBS, noting several executives were in the audience and he had to “suck up to the boss.” He also learned yesterday that Atlanta is home to Hooters. He recommended TBS and Hooters merge.  “We are funny,” he said, paraphrasing the TBS slogan, “and we have boobies!”

Here, he gives TBS some love in his parody version of Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again."

He gave his fans no clue about what his new show is going to be like or how he is going to prep over the next five months. But he clearly enjoyed the energy of the live show – and the audience gave him plenty.

Dave FM's Mara Davis managed to get backstage last night. I'm jealous! She met with him again but nobody took photos but she did get a shot with Andy Richter:

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