Watch: Paul Rudd Brings His "Mac And Me" Prank Back to "Conan"

Last night, Paul Rudd stopped by Conan to promote his new Netflix series, Living with Yourself, and after revealing he’s never watched Game of Thrones and likening his quick, easy-to-binge show to “the cornhole of TV” (“It’s the equivalent of someone saying ‘oh, you should learn how to play golf’ or something. I can’t do that, I missed the boat. I’m too old. Our show is like playing cornhole.”), he promised to show off a clip.

Now, if you’ve seen Rudd on Conan at any point in the last 15 years or so, you already know what happened next. Instead of showing an actual clip from his new project, the actor played an absurd clip from the 1988 E.T. ripoff Mac and Me.

Rudd has been playing the clip on his Conan appearances since 2004, when he first pranked the host by announcing he had a clip from the Friends series finale to show off. “There’s a lot of surprises in the last episode,” he deadpanned after debuting the Mac and Me clip. “It was pretty emotional.”

In 2013, when Rudd was on to promote Anchorman 2, Conan reacted by saying, “You’ve been showing that stupid clip on my show for I think 15 years. You always convince me you’re not going to show it again, and you promise me you’re not going to show it again, and you show it again.”

A couple years later, Rudd was on promoting Ant-Man, and he couldn’t resist the opportunity to offer a new twist on the bit, claiming Marvel wouldn’t allow him to show the Mac and Me clip and showing a snippet of an Ant–Man clip before it promptly cut to the familiar Mac and Me scene with his Ant-Man character edited in.

Rudd’s been showing the clip for so long now that devoted viewers immediately recognized it when he showed it last night (Oct. 22), cheering and clapping. “I love how many people in the audience were like, ‘Here we go,’” O’Brien said. In a nod to the cloning theme of Living with Yourself, two aliens popped up at the end instead of the usual one.

“After all these years, it was nice to see there was a little something different,” a laughing Conan added.

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