In the Year 2000…21
Anyone that launched a late night show after 1993 has Conan O’Brien or Jon Stewart to thank for it. Anyone that launched one and kept it can address their thank you notes to Conan Christopher O’Brien. He took the hits for everyone and indirectly taught networks to take a breath before cutting bait on a franchise host.
The preposterous irony of the end of his time at NBC is almost too rich a punchline to be believed. But through his impressive run at TBS and parts in between, the last … and lasting laugh is my pal Conan’s.
A generation of comedians have been influenced, nurtured and showcased over the course of his impressive 28 year run of making daily comedy. Some wrote for him, performed stand-up, sketches, did panel, or in some cases interned for him. No host since his predecessor can claim the same palpable impact. While Conan would lord that over any of these people to hilarious effect, he would never actually claim it. It’s one of the many reasons I am feeling so many emotions at the end of this incredible run.
To clarify, I am a bit more than a fan. For more than a decade, I was the media relations executive for all of NBC late night on the east coast which means my main focus was on two impossibly huge comedy brands: Late Night and SNL. It was a dream. Late night talk shows taught me how adults interact with each other and make each other laugh, they shaped my own voice and sensibilities and continue to be one of the few broadcast television entities that break through the noise time and time again.
It was a dream that now, years later, I still can’t believe actually happened.
I arrived after the period of week-by-week renewals, indifferent or hostile executives and occasional crucifixions by TV critics. I got to see Conan through the show’s fifth and tenth anniversaries, magazine cover shoots, an SNL hosting gig, two Emmy hosting stints, and got to read those same critics eat their words. We weathered unimaginable tragedies like 9/11, traveled to the Aspen Comedy Festival, Las Vegas for a keynote with Bill Gates, a post-SARS Toronto (remember when pandemics were brief?) and an ersatz state visit to Finland simply because he bore an uncanny resemblance to the (female) president of the Nordic nation. Not to mention a late night post Actor’s Studio interview dinner at Elaine’s with James Lipton (a memory that was brought roaring back to life on an episode of Conan’s unmissable podcast). And this is just — as Conan would say if he had a guest sticking around for a second segment — “just scratching the surface.”
I was also humbled to learn later from Bill Carter, the veteran correspondent from the front lines of the ‘Late Night Wars,’ that I was among the small group of people to know about the now infamous five-year-plan for him to take over The Tonight Show. When the news broke, I remember hovering just outside Conan’s office when he got the calls from David Letterman and Johnny Carson himself (no doubt from a Malibu tennis court). That I had any role in that moment of TV history and even merited a line or two in his unexpected “Late Shift” sequel (pages 44–45 in hardcover, if you must know) is a cherished badge of honor I could never have expected. But the memory of that time itself is even more dear.
Conan inspires that kind of investment and loyalty from those around him. It’s not an accident his stalwart and insanely talented Late Night staff, many of whom were there from the get-go at 30 Rock, made the migration west with him, weathered the unforeseen hiatus between networks and are still in his ranks now as he closes this chapter.
Through it all, the one takeaway I go back to time and time again is that Conan is simply the best on-camera talent I’ve ever worked with.
I have never met anyone funnier than Conan and I have been beyond fortunate to have known and worked with countless extremely funny people. His intelligence and sheer speed are always evident and the guy is never not funny…I mean it.
I would make my ‘rounds’ through the Late Night offices daily for meetings and the latest gossip from producers and writers and I’d almost always see Conan on his own quotidian office tour. Whether he was tackling his head writer or muttering “murder” over people’s shoulders, he was always on. But not in the insufferable, exhausting way you might imagine. He never sacrificed the genuine human connection with whomever was in the room. It was always there…even if you couldn’t immediately see it through the tears produced by the hard laughs. There were too many of those to count.
I came to the job a fully-fledged comedy nerd, but was also a closeted writer/comedian. What made my relationship with Conan truly precious was that he saw that part of me and never dismissed or demeaned it.
Conan never treated me like a network flack, even if I was often referred to as his “loyal monkey” or “Sweet Liepz” (the Z was a little excessive, and he remains the only person allowed to use the nickname…ever). It’s worth noting that typically, these addresses would precede an elaborate pantomime of the worst assassin alive. He’d make a massive arm-swinging telegraphing gesture before shooting me in the pancreas with a derringer — yes, it was a bit with a microscopic level of detail and I took (and will take) every one of his comedy bullets gleefully.
It wasn’t till later that I realized how truly lucky I was to work with him. He and his right hand in perpetuity, the unflappable Jeff Ross, brought me into rooms I could never have imagined I’d enter, given my professional role. I was invited to write jokes for the Emmys while still taking him through his red carpet paces, which included hours in a LA hotel suite as he plowed through no less than a metric ton of Gray’s Anatomy monologue jokes in a row…none of which ever made it to air. I have never laughed harder or longer than listening to him grind through them, punctuated by increasingly insane heckling from the writers in the room. The head monologue writer compiled them all and gave everyone bound printouts entitled “Comedy Gold, Vol. 1” after the show.
Another year, I had the thrill of watching him deliver a joke I wrote on air as an Emmy presenter for best actress. “Finally,” he said, “I get to live out my fantasy of disappointing four women at the same time.” I even got to co-author a “strike diary” for Entertainment Weekly with him during the Writers Guild Strike in 2008, which also has the distinction of being the only time I will ever hold a chimpanzee.
In a business where changing lanes is tricky, bordering on impossible, Conan was truly without borders — if he ever saw barriers at all. It allowed me to have the courage to transition from my public relations career to make my way as a producer and writer here in New York (including helping to launch his successor at 12:30) as he went west.
Conan often refers to having a ‘body of work’ and there will be more than enough written about his impact on comedy and his joyous elevation of silliness without sacrificing intelligence and most importantly empathy.
Without those qualities — who else could visit countries all over the world during a period when America’s international reputation was on a knife edge on a good day? Conan garnered big, real laughs without punching down while demonstrating a genuine curiosity in those people and places. No other host could do that as well, bar none.
Conan knows where the joke is and where the joke belongs. That’s seeing the Matrix code of comedy and it is rare and glorious to behold. I was lucky enough to watch him work and evolve for twelve years up close — from watching rehearsals on the in-house feed or sitting in on years of post-mortems with the producers — an often hilarious master class in television production. Essentially the best of what I’ve learned about TV and late night comedy came from him. The rest got filled in by Garry Shandling.
And while linear television gives way to the internet and streaming, one bright spot in this digital age is that there is now an accessible storehouse for that body of work. In a medium often considered time-bound and disposable Conan and Co’s canon (Co-non?) has no expiration date. When is Mr. T going apple picking or Jim Carrey in a biopic as Conan not a delight? Does it matter what year it is when there are insult comic dogs, robot pimps and masturbating bears to behold? And really — bullet proof legs need no context at all. They are just purely funny.
During the brain-meltingly insane cross-show fracas at the end of Conan’s criminally brief Tonight Show tenure (apparently networks remembered their itchy trigger fingers), David Letterman, with pitch-perfect sarcastic earnestness quipped about his “dream for American television:: “I just want everyone who wants a show to have a show.”
As the culture continues to splinter and our smartphones become control rooms and wherever we are is the studio…anyone can have a show. Very few, however, can truly make one and fewer can keep them going…even fewer still can do it three times, much less a fourth on HBO Max). But he will … and he has.
And for my part in any of it, I will never not be grateful and will not stop laughing till my pancreas falls out.
