Standup and Conan audience warm-up guy Jimmy Pardo will be taking Andy Richter’s place as sidekick on the TBS talk show tonight and tomorrow night. Richter will be busy for the next two days filming a pilot for a Fox game show called Step Up that was announced this morning, so Pardo will be temporarily bumped up to handle his Conan sidekicking duties.
Pardo has been working as the opening act for Conan O’Brien’s tapings since he was made host of The Tonight Show in 2009. When O’Brien jumped to TBS, Pardo came with. He prefers to be called the show’s “opening act†instead of “audience warm-up guy†because he does 10 minutes of standup before the show and leaves when it starts, rather than throwing out candy and yelling at people for not clapping like normal audience warm-up professionals. In addition to his work on Conan and his standup, Pardo hosts the widely-influential podcast Never Not Funny, which was partially responsible for birthing the LA podcast scene after Pardo started the show years ahead of the rest of the pack in 2006. While Jimmy Pardo will be filling in for Andy Richter on Conan over the next two nights, don’t expect Richter to leave if his game show pilot gets ordered to series. “I ain’t going nowhere,†Richter tweeted today. “I want as many jobs as my greedy ass can handle.â€