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By Ann Oldenburg – USA TODAY – March 9, 2006 World leaders, beware. Conan O'Brien says he couldn't have come up with a comedy bit as popular and funny as his five-day foray to Finland. So on Friday, he devotes the entire hour of Late Night with Conan O'Brien (NBC, 12:35 a.m. ET/PT) to his travelogue, which was filmed in February. It started when people from Finland kept popping up in his New York studio as part of the show's audience. He found out that not only is he very popular in Finland, but he's also a dead ringer for the country's first female president, Tarja Halonen. "She looks like me in a wig," he says. "People started howling about this." He then learned that she was running in a tight race for president and his comedy was influencing the election. She won narrowly, he says. So how does he feel about shaping the national debate? "It fed a sick part of me," he says. "When I find I've influenced an international election, my response is: But, of course. I can also move the sun across the sky. If it weren't for me, nighttime wouldn't come." So he figured he should visit. But he wasn't prepared for his Finnish fame. He says he was met by a crowd of thousands, including people dressed like him. Even on a trip to the Arctic Circle, he says, "their press followed me with a long lens." A visit to the Finnish Emmys, a reindeer farm and even an official meeting with Halonen were all "surreal," he says. "You felt like you were in some strange Fellini movie." To give viewers a sense of that, he decided to edit his 36 hours of footage into a one-hour show rather than airing bits nightly between a monologue and a chat with a celebrity. Says O'Brien: "Who needs Salma Hayek when I have the nation of Finland?" |