The New Yorker:

Talk shows have long brought musicians into our living rooms, giving them steady gigs and creating occasional musical magic. But maybe not for much longer.

By Chris Almeida

There’s a moment from a 2012 episode of Conan O’Brien’s former TBS show that I think about often. O’Brien’s guest, the comedian Eric André, sits down and grabs a microphone from the host’s desk. “Is this my microphone?” André asks, while trying to figure out a way to attach the desk mike to his shirt. Then he retches and picks up a nearby coffee mug. “What’s in here, oatmeal?” he asks. For anybody familiar with André’s comedy, which relies on the shocking and the absurd, all of this makes sense.

André settles in for a minute, riffing with O’Brien about his own series, a parody of late-night talk shows, which had recently premièred on Adult Swim. Then, as O’Brien is speaking, André suddenly stands up and yells, to O’Brien’s bandleader, “Jimmy Vivino, hit me!” Vivino is on it in an instant. We hear a pick slide, and the Basic Cable Band gets into an uptempo vamp. “Two times,” André says, and the band responds with two horn hits. “Three times,” he says. Three hits. Then the punchline: “One hundred times,” he shouts. The band plays twenty-three hits before O’Brien waves them off.

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