Jane Lynch Got Her Start Hosting Home Shopping Shows

Jane Lynch revealed on Conan Thursday night that her first time in front of the camera was working for a home shopping network in the mid-1980s, and the experience was fairly brutal.

"I was on the 2am to 5am shift," she said. "We took live phone calls in the middle of the night of people buying cubic zirconia, and I learned so much about being on my feet and dealing with uncomfortable situations, and learned a lot about improvising."

The brutal part was that she had to train people to take her job from her. "They were trying to replace me, too, the whole time, because I wasn't your typical kind of home shopping person," she explained. "So I would audition my replacements on the air, in front of me, and I would help them. Of course, being the nice Catholic girl, I'd go 'this is how you do it.'"

Conan airs weeknights at 11:00 PM ET on TBS.

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Andy Hunsaker has a head full of sitcom gags and nerd-genre lore, and can be followed @AndyHunsaker if you're into that sort of thing.