14 DAY TRIAL // He might be out of a job and unable to secure one until his contract with NBC expires, but Conan O’Brien remains immensely popular. As proof of that is the reaction he received for his recently set up Twitter page, which got an estimated of 100,000 followers in about three hours and is now up to 358,018 followers, as The Hollywood Reporter can also confirm.
We were also telling you a while back that, until his contract with NBC is up, O’Brien is unable to move to another network without losing some of the money (in the sense of returning) he got as part of his settlement for being kicked out The Tonight Show. So, instead of voluntarily taking out of his pocket anything of the $32.5 million he reportedly got from the network, O’Brien has come up with another way of keeping his fans up to speed and, at the same time, entertained: on Twitter.
“Today I interviewed a squirrel in my backyard and then threw to commercial. Somebody help me,” reads Coco’s first tweet. He then returns to say, “This morning I watched Remington Steele while eating Sugar Smacks out of a salad bowl. I was [without clothes].” And the humor doesn’t stop here either, as the funnyman describes himself in his Bio as “I had a show. Then I had a different show. Now I have a Twitter account.”
As noted above, fans love it. “If Conan O’Brien’s debut on Twitter is any indication, Coco fever is stronger than ever. In his first public comment since his final Tonight Show on Feb. 12, O’Brien launched a Twitter account Wednesday afternoon, @conanobrien, and sent his first tweet. […] What followed was a wildfire on the microblogging site. Within the first three hours, O’Brien had more than 100,000 followers, with 1,000 new fans signing up every minute,” THR writes.
The reaction to the Twitter page is just the latest instance in which we have concrete proof that “Coco fever,” as THR calls it, is as high as ever. Earlier this month, word got out in the media that O’Brien personally took care of the salaries of some of his staff who had not been covered by the new contract with NBC, taking $7.5 million out of his own pocket for it.