On his recent trip to Ghana, Conan O’Brien visited one of his favorite painters — the Ghanaian movie poster artist, Daniel Anum Jasper.
Known for adding tastefully grotesque embellishments to posters for movies the majority of which he’s never seen — except for 1985’s “War Bus,” of course — Jasper took a stab at making a poster for the “Conan” show without any prior knowledge of what it’s actually about.
The result is a beautifully detailed painting featuring a shirtless Conan grabbing a dinosaur bird by the beak with his bare hands. Hovering above him is the uncannily accurate likeness of Conan’s right-hand man, Andy Richter, holding the severed head of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower in one hand (an homage to Conan’s Eisenhower mug) and a gun, pointed at the dino-bird, in the other.
Just for the bit, Conan made a pretend movie-trailer for this fictional storyline, in which he does indeed fight a dino-bird, while Richter and a Frankenstein-version of Eisenhower secretly plot his demise. You can watch the video above.
Conan’s special, “Conan Without Borders: Ghana,” premiered Nov. 7, and finds the comedian visiting the African nation accompanied by actor and comedian Sam Richardson (“Veep,” “Detroiters”) whose Ghanaian heritage and life experience makes him the perfect cultural attache, according to TBS.
“Conan” airs weeknights at 11/10c on TBS.