Even without a nightly TV talk show, the lanky, guitar-wielding, ousted “Tonight Show” host Conan O’Brien managed to please fans at Ohio State Monday night.

As a special stop on the 32-city “Conan: Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour,” O’Brien performed for more than 5,000 OSU students at the Schottenstein Center.

“This is the first time anyone’s paid to see me,” O’Brien said. “Trust me, they’ve paid to see me go away.”

Taking the stage wearing a red, No. 2 OSU football jersey over a purple dress shirt, O’Brien explained to the audience that he wasn’t wearing the jersey to brown-nose.

“I know some of you think I’m wearing this to suck up to you,” O’Brien said. “But I want to tell you, I wore this exact jersey every night on ‘The Tonight Show’ but NBC digitally edited it out.”

O’Brien also sported something new to viewers who hadn’t seen him since he left “The Tonight Show” in January: a healthy, red beard.

“Someone said I look like the Brawny paper towel guy just before his bone marrow transplant,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien then induced the crowd into an “O-H … I-O” cheer and jested at the reaction.
“That is freaking scary,” he said. “That’s crazy. I feel like Mussolini up here.”

OSU is the third and final college stop on O’Brien’s 32-city tour, and according to O’Brien, the only one that is still in session.

“Every other college student in America is either at the beach or snowboarding through pot right now,” he said.

O’Brien spotted a group of four students with a sign saying, “We’ll name our first-born daughters ‘Conan’ for a picture with you on-stage,” and proceeded to let them on stage for a photo.

“You just ruined four unborn children’s lives,” O’Brien said.

He outlined the eight stages of grief he went through after being fired from “The Tonight Show,” including the stage, “36 hours of Red Bull and ‘Halo.'”

“I got really good at ‘Halo,'” O’Brien said. “I totally ‘pwned’ skaterdude4. It was epic ownage. And no, I don’t know what I just said.”

A video opened the show presenting O’Brien as overweight and disheveled after being fired from “The Tonight Show.”

Then, O’Brien said he had an epiphany.

“One day I got out of bed, I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, ‘Conan, quit your whining, grow a pair and get your ass to Ohio State,'” O’Brien said, emulating former president John F. Kennedy, or as he joked, at least one of the Kennedys.

The show featured several musical numbers, including O’Brien singing about his family in a knock-off of Elvis Presley’s song, “Polk Salad Annie,” as well as an incomplete song written by O’Brien himself.

O’Brien also led The Legally Prohibited Band in “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes, as well as personalized takes on Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” Cake’s cover of Gloria Gaynor’s, “I Will Survive,” The Band’s, “The Weight” and Ronnie Hawkins’ “Forty Days.”

Andy Richter, O’Brien’s co-host at “The Tonight Show” and several seasons of “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” took the stage an hour into the show.

O’Brien joked that he was so used to throwing to commercial from his shows that he needed Richter to voice commercials during the tour.

Richter chose to plug Columbus’ Thurman Café.

“The Thurmanator is a towering testament to American dominance in the field of junk food engineering,” Richter said. “Just one bite and your taste buds will scream, ‘Hey mother Russia, f— you!'”

O’Brien then brought out the “‘Walker, Texas Ranger’ Lever” — now retitled the “Chuck Norris Rural Policeman Handle” because of a settlement with NBC — and played absurd clips from the “Walker, Texas Ranger” show.

Several other videos played, including one featuring O’Brien as a “generic network executive,” poking fun at NBC and its current state of programming, as well as a video clip of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog with an obvious voiceover in certain parts to localize his jokes.

Five thousand tickets were made available for the show on May 3 by the Ohio Union Activities Board for students only. A long queue of students waited outside the Ohio Union to receive their free tickets, and ticket quantities were gone by May 6. However, OUAB offered 600 more tickets Sunday.

Now, O’Brien and Company are continuing their tour before kicking-off his new late-night show on TBS November 8. The tour is moving to New York City’s Radio Music Hall for performances June 1 and 2 and the tour concludes in Atlanta on June 14.

However, O’Brien refused to play one place in particular: the University of Michigan.

“Any school that has a football stadium that big must have a small penis,” he said.