EiltRft$BilB

EiltRft$BilB-
one caveat
O'BRIEN OFFERS
for
who blithely
those
assume he'll inherit
Tonight ShowwhenJay Leno steps down in2009.
NBCI
"If I dont diel" he exclaims, sitting in his office in
in New York Ciry one recenr evening. "I
"Itt like the end of rhe movie The
Dirty Dozen, when one of the characters says, 'We made it!'
Rockefeller Center
always add that," he says.
Then he gets shot."
O'Brien was still vinkling after the 2,022nd taping of Late
Night with Conan O'Brien, towering like a kid giant in his
cramped NBC headquarrers, cluttered with guitars, TV
mementos and assorted cartoon renderings of his by-now iconic persona: gawky, self-skewering man-child with the lit-match
pompadour, the contortionist dance moves and the ironic ad-
mant thumbs-up.
After thirteen years ofredefining after-hours funny business
with his own jump-cut humor and maniacal wink, O'Brien,
forty-two, is now a late-night bigJeaguer whose furure is written in the stars
or ar least in a multimillion-dollar, multi- his unforeseen death, he is going to host
year contract. Barring
the granddaddy of all late-night shows, taking over for Leno in
2009, who replaced Johnny Carson in 1992, who took over for
Jack Paar in 1962, who replaced Steve Allen in 1957.
O'Brien has developed into the most consistently funny
man on late-night television, Jon Stewartt cable-powered gravitas norwithstanding. But if theret one thing het learned
and not at all easily
itt that late-night hosts are self-made,
not crowned. And to fill the shoes of the untouchable Johnny
Carson, O'Brien will have to grow into them. Y/ith the ink dry
on his contract, O'Brien knows it would be easy for him to
coast now And it isnt so much his literal mortaliry he fears, but
his comical mortaliry.
"Thatt the challenge I have right now," he confesses. "I've
got three years and change to
die. I intuitively know that
^ot starting The'Tonight Show
'No, you cant do that, because you're
and you're abeady staning to calcify."'
In the conventional wisdom of nerworkTV, theret no place
better than I 1:35 p.m. on NBC if you're a guy who wears a suit
and tie and wants to tell jokes ro as many Americans as possible. The Tbnight Show has long been a program with cultural
import, taking the pulse of the enterrainment and political life
of the country offering a humanizing
stage
right?
'Am I going to be the -rudder?" O'Brien
ly. "Yery unlikely. Probably not a good idea
asks, rhetoricalto make me the
rudder.
"I dont know that theret going to be the Late-Night Guy
anymore," he continues. "'Would I be really happy if five years
from now 1 became the Late-Night Guy? And people were,
like, 'I'm sorry, but Conan just does it so well, I cant bear to
see anybody else.' Okay, I'll take that. Highly unlikely."
The idea of a national funnyman was split in two when
David Letterman and Jay Leno went inro hand-to-hand combat for Carsont chair in the early 1990s. It was further watered
down by 500 cable oprions, dozens of competing chat shows
38
@mmy
ginal at best.
By O'Briens way of thinking, thatt not a bad thing. "The
network isnt going ro agree with this," he says, "but maybe in
a healthy way, people are, you know
if you want this, yon
turn here; if you want that, you turn -there."
Nevertheless, with about 6 million viewers a night, The
Tbnight Shou remains the biggest comedy platform on TV. And
Lenot generational baton pass still felt like a significant cultural shift, from a middle-brow Everyman to
what?
a six-
foot-four-inch alien!
It was indeed srrange ro many that Leno was willing to
relinquish the show, given that his contract technically allowed
him to keep it until 2010. But with O'Brien being romanced
by both Fox and ABC to host other late-night shows, Jeff
Zucker, president of NBC Universal Television Group, knew
O'Brien was too good to lose. The hids loue him, and the kids
are going to get oldcr and start buying Ford truchs! Bewreen
NBCI need to keep O'Brien
and Leno's apparent desire to
- like the one with Lerrerman
avoid another protracted struggle
a deal was cut and a course was set: From Burbank,
-California,
it's The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien!
WHEN O'BRIEN BUR
through the royal-blue curtains of Late Night for the 2,022nd
dme that night, he did his cusromary intro: he spun on his
heel, zigzagged around the stage to Max \Teinbergt propulsive
beat, doing his patented pasriche of bebop mime, flashing a
third-wall-breaking wink ro rhe camera, then leaping and landing precisely on the mark when the band hit the final blaring
note.
,Late night has come a long way from Carsont golf swings
and Lettermant nervous tie-straightening.
"I deal in cartoonish clichds," O'Brien says. "Those are my
favorite tools. Kind
of a Jimmy
Olson-slash-Oar
Gang-sIash-|940s radio serial
you know, the enthusiastic
'Yes sirl \7e can do it, sir!' kind- of guy. Those kinds of things
just pop into my head and I'll do them."
for Holllwood
celebrities, presidents and governators ro greer the public. But
the cultural significance of the show has changed along with
television itself. As eulogists observed, Carson was a kind of
calming social rudder during unique political times, when
riots, war and cultural upheaval beamed rhrough only three
channels.
But those days are over
and the internet. Today, Stewart on Comedy Central is
Americat political wearhervane, a guy named Craig Ferguson is
settling in at CBS and the impact of late-night TV seems mar-
It wasnt always
easy
to be so spontaneous while the cam-
rolled. If you watched him through the years, O'Brien says,
"for better or worse, you'll see me becoming more and more
unconscious. I used to really think, 'Should I take that chance?'
And I dont think about much anymore.
"Your subconscious becomes your television persona,"
he says.
In the early days of the show, he imagined himself as a Bic
lighter that had to warm up rhe enrire ocean
which meant
he needed a lot of time for the audience to grapple
with this
strange new guy while his subconscious emerged and became
more familiar.
"If I got in a time machine now
with what I can do now
- to September 13, 1993,
with an audience
and went back
- guy, I dont think people would like it,"
and came out as this
he observes. "It would be: 'You're jumping off camera, you're
hissing, you're licking your eyebrows, you're changing expressions a lot, you're muttering inro commercial breaks.' Nothing
eras
would be right."
The story of O'Brient disastrous first year hosting Late
F:trii;1jl:n:i:
-.:l'l .l
:'1i..:
i;$:.
.';1::
., :.. 'li
':
t:
Night is well known. Lorne Michaels, executive producer of
Saturday Night Liue (now also an exec producer of Late Night,
along with Jeff Ross), had pitched O'Brien to NBC as a
replacement for Letterman when he departed for CBS. After
O'Brien's September'93 premiere, Washington PostTY critic
Tom Shales interpreted his quick-cut sr/e as "a living collage of
annoying nervous habits." He suggested the host "return to
Conan O'Blivion whence he came."
To make things worse, the network had deep uncertainties
about him. Once O'Brien took over for Letterman, Late Night
struggled in the ratings. After the first year was over, NBC
opted for a while to renew O'Brient contract on a week-toweek basis, a painful show of no-confidence that left O'Brien
smarting for years. Only later did he learn he was nearly canceled one night, but rehired the next morning. As he told the
New Yorh Timeslast yeaa "NBC made it more difficult than it
had to be."
In time, the nework became a firm supporter of his show,
but it never came around to his sidekick, Atdy Richter, whose
dark, prickly persona was seen as a liabiliry for O'Brien if he
wanted to lighten his palette and widen his audience. Richter
departed in 2000, leaving O'Brien to figure out how to evolve
on his own.
At first, O'Brien seemed too self-consciously smart to be a
TV clown
which eventually became part of the pleasure of
his absurd -sryle. O'Brien summed it up best in a commencement speech he gave in 2000 at his alma mater, Harvard (where
his father, Thomas, is an associate professor of medicine). "I
wrote a thesis: 'Literary Progeria in the works of Flannery
I
their eye: '\Why are you at this parry? 'Who invited you?"'
O'Brien recalls. "Johnny did
a
little monologue when they gave
him an award. He said something like"
and here O'Brien
does an admirable Carson impression - "'And NBC is also
starting a clothing drive for Co-nan O-Bri-en.'
"I got into show business just in time to see Carson make
fun of me in a monologue joke," he muses. "It was such a surreal experience. Johnny went into seclusion after that,"
Carson had been a distant icon to O'Brien when he was a
kid, the third of six children in an Irish-Catholic household in
Brookline, Massachusetts. He remembers watching Tonight
with his comedy-buff father, sitting on the floor of the living
room. "I was always interested in funny people in television,
and [Carson] was the Guy," he says. "It was the same feeling I
had when I saw a Beatle."
O'Brien and his older brothers, Neal and Luke, were big
fans of SCW, the legendary skit show from Canada that regularly lampooned Carsont generation and TV in general. On
late night, Letterman was the focus of O'Brient informal education in comedy while at Harvard, "Dave is on, and I'm up
that late, and Im very interested in what het doing and that
show is speaking to me," he recalls. "In my formative years, that
was the job I really wanted."
In the late 1980s, O'Brien tried out as a writer for
Lettermant Late Nightbtt was turned down. "I was crushed,"
he says.
Even though O'Brien wanted badly to reinvent late-night
TV when he took over for Letterman, he found that sticking
with the traditional format
-
suit, tie, monologue, desk, band
N'I
GOT INTO SHOW BUSINESS JUST IN TIME TO SEE CARSON
MAKE FUN OF ME IN A MONOLOGUE JOKE.'' HE MUSES. ''IT
WA$ SUCH A SUHHEAL EXFERIENCE. JOHNNY WENT INTO
SECLUSION AFTER THAT.''
O'Connor and \Tilliam Faulkner,"' he told the students. "Lett
just say that during my discussions with Pauly Shore, it doesnt
come up much."
His sensibiliry has always been distinctly East Coast, a
lighter,
professional cutup in the Ivy League tradition
quicker, more charmingly self-deprecating than anyone else in
the room.
After editing the Haruard Lampoonin college, he started his
career as a comedy writer, beginning with a shortlived stint on
HBO's classic Not Necessarily the Newl He eventually got a successful gig writing for Saturday Night Liae, for which he won an
Emmy Award in 1939. (It remains his only win, despite three
writing nominations for Sl/Z and nine for Late Night.) SffZ led
in '91 to writing and producing for The Simpsons, and the
quick pacing and multi-layered jokes of the Matt Groening cartoon would inform O'Brient comic tempo. On the wall of his
office is a frame from an episode of The Simpsons an animated
O'Brien interviewing Bart Simpson.
O'Brien is sensitive to the legacy of late-night he will inherit in '09. \7hen he was hired, O'Brien was issued two suits by
NBC: one black with a gray tie, the other silver with a red tie.
In O'Brient office hangs a photo of himself at a network affair
wearing the latter. He is shaking hands with Johnny Carson,
and also wearing
then white-haired and preparing to retire
a silver suit and a red tie. Theyre both smiling.
"It was an interesting time because people had this look in
was more effective than
trying to break the mold. "I felt this
-expectation from people," he recalls. "You know: 'He's going to
be in a blue cube, he'll be wearing a suit made of Slim Jims,
he'll shout strange words at the camera in Dutch and graly will
het
fire into the audience, which will be a bunch of robots
going to completely reinvent it."'
The "trade secret," he says, was the opposite: to use the old
format to create an expectation, which his comedy could constantly bend and undercut.
"The way to make a guy jumping up on his desk or dancing like a robot funny is to have him in a suit and tie," he says.
"If I was wearing a T-shirt and a leather jacket and sort of saying, 'Yo, yo, we're back!' and was dressed like an MTV veejay,
suddenly you have to work a hundred times harder. How can
you color outside the lines when there are no lines?"
From the start, the style ofthe show was retro, a bachelorpad aesthetic that even predated Carson
2 $1svg Allen-era
Rat Pack flair pressed in Silly Putty and-stretched into postmodern absurdity.
For all his Brechtian theatrics, howevet O'Brien can be
deceptively conventional. Heret a rypical joke from a 2002
monologue: "It was reported today that Osama bin Laden has
fifry brothers and sisters," he said, 'which absolutely shocked
me because I had no idea he was Catholic."
Itt the kind of joke Letterman or even Carson could have
told
a classic steamed-and-pressed late-night one-liner fol-
-
41
lowed by a beat that hangs in the air so the audience can fill it
with laughter. Or not. Like Carson, O'Brien is also a pro ar saving failed jokes with his face, sending up a perfectly timed
comic distress signal or posring an exclamarion point on rhe
moment by narrowing his eyes or arching an eyebrow.
O'Brient addiction to late-night TV, he says, came from the
serendipitous, unscripted moments
especially inrerviews,
which have become his strong suit. In -February, for instance, he
surprised movie critic Roger Ebert by recalling Ebertt reviews of
porn movies in the 1970s. That jarred the critic and sent him
into a defensive tizzy. O'Brien straightened up, giggled and
feigned innocence, which only stoked Ebertt discomfort.
"Itt this little thing that was created out of the ether, like a
funnel cloud that forms on the prairie," explains O'Brien of
such ephemeral TV moments. "Itt there for a second, and you
look at it, and itt got this energy and then it's gone. If my legs
were crushed, I d drag myself back in here to try and get anorher one of those: 'Let me ger rhar again, that feels so grear, rhar
is so thrilling."'
Itt also what The Tbnight Showhas always been about.
"You look at those Carson best-of clips, and what are they?"
he asks. "Overwhelmingly, theyie things going wrong. They're
jokes not working, they're interviews veering offcourse, they're
things breaking
thatt the beaury of these shows. Those are
all my favorite -parts. Theyre things not going according to
plan. And you say, 'Look what's happened,' and people unite.
People are electrified by that."
THIS AGE OF UNCER.
tainty and political division, The Daily ShowsJon Stewart has
shown that a different late-night format and more pointed
political humor can grab a mainsrream audience, even on cable.
Stewart has become the comedian of the moment
and quite
possibly a harbinger of things to come. In 2008 -his contract
will come up at Comedy Central, a properry ofViacom, which
also owns CBS. So should Letterman decide to step down in
the next few years, as Leno has done, itt not difficult ro imagine Stewart, as the hosr of Late Night, going head-to-head with
O'Brien at I l:35 p.m.
Vhile he respects Stewart, O'Brien says rhat sort of narrow
political humor doesnt interest him. And he doesnt feel like
het shirking The Tonight Show's tradition by avoiding it. "I
never got into comedy to riff on the day's headlines," he says,
adding later: "I dorit want anyone to learn anfhing from my
show, come to a new understanding. I dont want anybody to
ever, when theyte watching me, nod their head and go, 'Give
it to him!"'
O'Brien and exec producer Ross have been hearing from
critics and observers about the need to amp up rhe political
humor. They are a little defensive about it.
"Vx Carson a political show?" asks Ross. "No. Is Letterman
a political show? No. ls Leno a political show? No. Lisren, Jon
Stewart is a really funny show, but he's on cable.'Weie a network show You do what you do. You do what seems natural."
In 1972 NBC moved The Tbnight Show Staning Johnny
Carson from New York to L.A., forever changing the atmosphere from one of intimate, adult sophistication to a wide-open
big top of Hollywood glitz and goof, a place where Tiny Tim
would become famous. \7hile irt not quite official, O'Brien
says he would likely move ro California ro hosr the show
42
@mmY
"By the time I take over The Tbnight Show, I'lI have been
doing this for sixteen years," he says. "I might need a huge
kick in the ass to reset, ro recalibrate, in some creative *"y io
put the odometer back to zero, zero, zero, zero. And doing a
show in Los Angeles might feel like going to Mars
but in
-
a good way."
If critics scratch their chins and wonder how O'Brien will
adapt his mix of prickly pupper humor and advanced ironic
shtick (Robert Smigelt Tiiumph the Insult Comic Dog, the
Masturbating Bear, Clutch Cargo) to a broader swath of viewers, O'Brien himself isnr troubled by the thought.
"Itt importanr nor ro overanalyze it," he says. "I'm not
going to go into a closed room with a bunch ofexecutives and
unveil a plan that says, 'All right, I ve broken it down, and
according to NASAT compurer, what I need is a 32 percent
shift toward country-music jokes and 11 percenr lean toward
pro-Hispanic limericks."'
O'Brien doesnt presume to know exacrly who his audience
is
whether young or middle-aged, left-wing or right, nursing- moms or drunken frat guys. Nerwork TV still casts a wide
net. And in a sense, O'Brien is becoming more mainstream
himself. In the corner of his office, behind the microwave, is a
black-and-white photo of himself in 2003 with his newborn
daughter, Neve, lying in the crook of his arm. He's a father
now, married rcLiza Powel O'Brien, an ad execurive, whom he
met during a spoof on advertising in which Liza was a guest.
(They married in 2002 in Seattle, her hometown.)
By'09 O'Brien will be forry-five
nor exacdy the age
- audiences with cutwhen comics are interested in alienating
ting-edge pranks on French-Canadians, like his controversial
show in Toronto in 2003.In four years, he may more strongly
resemble the crazy uncle who cracks up the dinner guests rh;n
the frenetic wit telegraphing secrer winks to Generaiion X.
\(hen he took over The Tbnight Show, Leno was criticized
for losing his "edge," of going for broader jokes to please the
big, thick middle of America. And it worked: He pulled in 6
million viewers a night and regularly trumped Lerrerman,
whose gap-toothed irony and smug self-assurance still didnt
work for some parrs of the populace. O'Brien is fully aware of
what people said about Leno's Doritos pitchman incarnation,
and he keeps that in mind.
"I worry about that day when I've got my repertoire of silly
things I ve discovered over rhe years and that's it
I'm done,"
he says. "The minute you think you're done, thatt- when the rot
sets in. And that goes for any comedian."
O'Brien is already noricing that some people think he's
funny even when he doesir feel particularly funny. Sometimes
theyie just happy he wore his silver suit and red tie. "Slowly,
over time, if you're lucky, youte becoming this person who's
just there for people," he says.
That's The Tonight Show job description in a nutshell. And
O'Brien, a man who once wanted to shake up the form, is now
going to be the form. That, in itselfi is a challenge. It leaves only
one measure of success: Conan O'Brien has to make Conan
O'Brien laugh.
"Theret this thing called common sense that I tend to rely
sn," Q'Srien says. "And my feeling about doing an 1l:30 show
is, Job
No.
l:
Be funny. Just be funny the way you've learned
how to be funny."
@
JOE HAGAN is the teleuision columnist for the New York
Observer.
;