Watching beloved characters, especially those who look like universal childhood icon Santa Claus, get their heads hacked off by a psychopathic one-eyed egotist isn't anyone's idea of funny, right? Unless you're a psychopathic egotist, it's hard to find much humor in a situation like that.

In fact, 'The Walking Dead' may be the gloomiest show on TV right now. No one ever cracks a smile. No one ever laughs. And little everyday things -- like, say, hygiene and sex -- fall by the wayside for the most part. That stuff happens when there's a zombie apocalypse happening all around you.

It doesn't help that the minute you finally warm to a character on the show, BAM!, they kill him or her off. So yeah, it's safe to say very few people are laughing their asses off when they're watching 'The Walking Dead.'

But Conan O'Brien lightened the mood a little last night with his spot-on parody of the hit TV show (which returns on AMC Sunday night). In the two-and-a-half-minute clip, O'Brien, turned into one of the walking dead, wanders the woods in search of whatever all those zombies on 'The Walking Dead' are wandering in the woods in search of.

With help from his GPS, O'Brien stumbles into a cabin occupied by sidekick Andy Richter, who's obliviously lost in a pair of headphones. You can see what happens next in the above video.

Cast members from 'The Walking Dead' -- including Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus and Lauren Cohan -- later showed up to talk about the program's return. And they all seemed to have a way better time than they do on their full-time gig. Then again, there's not much to smile about when some dude whose skin is peeling off is trying to eat your spleen, is there?

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