Start the New Year Right by Watching Mitch Hedberg on Late Night with Conan O’Brien

Altogether Mitch.

NBC

Usually, Americans are only aware of our nightmarish copyright laws and the systems that have sprung up to take advantage of them when a corporation decides to no longer make its product available to audiences, like when Disney removes movies from its streaming service, or when Disney removes movies from movie theaters, or when a third party preemptively removes Baby Yoda gifs from their website on the theory that that’s what Disney would want. On the other hand, occasionally a corporation decides to freshen up the landscape of artificial scarcity by redistributing some arbitrary piece of film or television that’s been locked up in their copyright vault for years, and that’s a nice surprise for everyone, so who’s to say what’s right? For instance, on Oct. 12, 2004, television audiences who tuned into NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien—perhaps curious because of the announcement two weeks earlier that its host would eventually be replacing Jay Leno on The Tonight Show—got to see the late, great Mitch Hedberg perform standup comedy. Now, thanks to Team Coco, TBS, NBC, YouTube, and the promotional needs of Laurie Kilmartin’s “Best of Conan Standup” Stitcher Premium podcast, we can all start the year off by watching Hedberg do his thing.

It’s kind of hard to believe, but there’s no way to purchase the complete episode this set was part of. (Meanwhile, all three episodes of the short-lived CGI sitcom Father of the Pride that NBC aired earlier that night are readily available.) Although O’Brien announced back in 2018 that he’d be releasing an online archive of full episodes of Late Night with Conan O’Brien, so far, that’s only meant clips—though, to be fair, the process of digitally remastering them seems to be pretty complicated:

The actual cause of delay here is probably the music featured on the show—replacing the original music is the reason The State took so long to make it to home video—which means that even if the Oct. 12, 2004 episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien eventually appears online, there’s no guarantee that it will match the original broadcast. Still, the part of the show in which Mitch Hedberg performed standup comedy has now resurfaced. We’ll keep you updated about the rest of the episode, which featured appearances from Tom Green and Brian Williams, as the situation develops. Worst case scenario, this episode of Late Night With Conan O’Brien will enter the public domain on Jan. 1, 2100. See you then!

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