Conan O’Brien takes viewers on a tour of Berlin this week in the travel special “Conan Without Borders: Berlin,” and in doing so stumbled across some of the city’s more… eccentric inhabitants.
During a press lunch at a German restaurant in Los Angeles, O’Brien detailed different parts of the trip, which included a trip to the dungeon of a dominatrix named Lady Velvet Steel.
“She wanted to put things inside of me and do things to me, and I kept trying to stop her but keep it on the line where it would still be comedic but not break my marital vows,” O’Brien joked. “I found nothing pleasurable about that. And I knew that what was funny about that was that my discomfort was real.”
One of O’Brien’s guides on the trip was German comedian and “Pitch Perfect 2” star Flula Borg. Borg taught O’Brien some old-fashioned German drinking songs and then showed him a nearby nude beach, at which Borg wore nothing but a pair of colorful sneakers. But the trip was not all about comedy.
“One of the things I found very impressive about Berlin is the degree to which they not only own their 20th-century history,” he said. “They really go out of their way to constantly remind themselves about it.”
One memorial that O’Brien found particularly striking was a set of stone book shelves with no books on them, erected on the site where the Nazis held a book burning rally in the 1930s.
“Conan Without Borders: Berlin” airs tonight at 10 p.m./9c on TBS.
