As a comedian, Conan O’Brien is used to dealing with hecklers. In fact, he’s done several bits dealing with experience including nasty YouTube commenters in the audience and a cameo on Futurama, in which he quickly down a heckling robot by touting his God given soul and freckles. He was less successful with an interrupting smoke alarm during the show monologue.
“Hey @TeamCoco! We hear @wizkhalifa is on FIRE tonight on #Conan! Like, actually, literally fire. Smoke alarms & all,” TBS teased on Twitter an hour before the show aired.
The alarm was set off by a trashcan fire by musical guest Wiz Khalifa, who is chronic smoker so to speak. Sidekick Andy Richter eagerly volunteered to go back stage stage and make sure the joint was okay. Fortunately, there was no evacuation but it was not a case of the show must gone. Conan simply waited for it go off before continuing. Thankfully, the indifferent audience stayed in their seats while the building was possibly burning down. Conan later joked that they were thinking “You gotta go sometime.”
To pass the time the host allowed an audience member to ask him question then immediately reprimanded him for daring to actually do it but thanked him for stopping the alarm, albeit coincidentally. Conan then made a subtle segue back to the monologue.
“Where were we?” he asked. “Oh yeah, cue card.”
Wiz Khalifa didn’t confirm exactly what he was smoking in the dressing room but he later tweeted “Anything for the green.”