Who'd Have Thought? Conan Turns Cool
Talk about your comeback kid. Three years after his disastrous debut, Conan O'Brien has transformed himself into the man of the Late Night hour.
by Mark Lasswell -- TV Guide -- June 22, 1996 -- Pgs. 16-22
A year ago, the
Internet was an almost Conan-free environment. Then again, a year ago Late
Night with Conan O'Brien was just beginning to coalesce into the cheeky talk
show laced with comedy segments that Jeanene Garafalo calls, "as funny or
funnier than anything [David] Letterman was doing way back when."
These days, an army of young fans has plunged into cyberspace to celebrate their LNwCOB obsession. At one unofficial site, a team of 10 volunteers is compiling a precise summary of each Late Night broadcast as it airs. A dozen other web pages offer up enough Conanalia to launch a doctoral thesis --including samples of O'Brien's undergrad writing for the Harvard Lampoon, such as a war story called "The Naked and the Well-Read." And the truly devoted can even peruse an article co-authored by Conan's dad, Dr. Thomas O'Brien, an infectious-disease specialist: "WHONET: An Information System for Monitoring Antimicrobial Resistance." "Pretty soon they're going to find my illegal transactions from five years ago. I'm scared," Conan says with a laugh. "But it's fascinating, because we put a lot of layers into the show and the fact that they're out there picking up on it is really nice."
People far beyond the Internet are picking up on Late Night. The show's hold on the young-adult viewers coveted by advertiser's is up 10 percent for the second season in a row --NBC is hiking advertising rates by a like amount -- and Late Night regularly bests Tom Snyder's Late Late Show in the ratings. Even Washington Post critic Tom Shales, who wrote not long after its 1993 debut that "O'Brien's show just lies there, as lifeless as road kill," has become a convert. Now, he enthusiastically compares O'Brien to Johnny Carson in his ability to deliver "nasty" material and seem "like a choirboy" while doing it. "It's a weird thing," Shales says. "The show was one of those rockets that blow up on the launching pad, and then later you look up and it's in orbit." Late Night with Conan O'Brien, the critic says, "is probably my favorite late-night show."
The humor is free-ranging and irreverent, intended to appeal to the young as well as to midnight living-room ramblers and anyone who can appreciate the humor of a show that sends its host and his sidekick, Andy Richter, to a "Hawaiian" beach that looks suspiciously like Coney Island and where the heat supposedly is so intense that the shivering duo eagerly don parkas for protection. Ben Stiller, director of "The Cable Guy" and, like Garafalo, a member of the 30-something entertainment elite that regularly turns up on the show, admires O'Brien's ability to tweak talk-show clichés. "It's cool to see a guy with a young sensibility finding himself on television," Stiller says.
O'Brien has found himself -- after looking lost during the grim days in the fall of 1993, when he left his job as a Simpsons writer and producer, took over the NBC post vacated by David Letterman, and was instantly pilloried. At first, O'Brien and head writer and coproducer Robert Smigel -- a friend since the two were writing partners at Saturday Night Live in the late 1980s -- focused too intently on perfecting the show's ambitious comedy bits, which sometimes even popped up in the middle of interviews. Rehearsing the material until the last minute meant O'Brien had little time to prepare for his guests. "I wasn't really listening to the person in the interview," recalls Conan. "I was worried about 'I gotta make sure I fire the cannon at the right moment and the duck falls.'"
And then there's the show-business mantra that talk shows are ultimately about only one thing: the host. At first, during Late Night rehearsals, O'Brien was the cautious consensus-builder. ("What do we think?" he recalls himself saying. "We think this? OK.") Eventually, he says, "I realized that if the show goes off the air, my ass is on the line in a big way," and he started running rehearsals more decisively. ("Cut this. Make act four the desk piece. Add a few jokes and let's do it Friday.") Late Night executive producer Lorne Michaels -- also creator and producer of SNL -- explains how the transformation cam about: "I think with Robert (Smigel) there, who is a brilliant comedy writer, it was very hard for Conan to move from the role of the writer to the role of a star. I think that when Robert left the show [in January 1995] and when other writers left the show, and Conan was still there, he grew into it."
O'Brien says he's "too close to the Robert thing to speak about it." Smigel who still performs frequently on Late Night and calls O'Brien "one of my best friends," says he resigned as head writer feeling "burned out" but confident that "we'd gotten rid of the things that produced awkward moments." And he recognized the way Late Night has changed: "Originally it was a conceptual comedy show that Conan fit in to. Now it's Conan's show that the comedy fits into."
It was around the time when O'Brien assumed more control, early last year that he got a call from his sister Kate. "She said, 'You know, you're really starting to sound like you do around the dinner table at home,'" he recalls. "And I thought. "Uh-huh, well, that's the idea.' The most important thing to me was to do a show that i believed in, not what I hoped someone else would find funny. Because if it didn't work, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life thinking, 'What if?'"
But O'Brien does take outsiders into account with one comedy litmus test: Will his brothers think it's funny? O'Brien, who is the third of six siblings in a Boston family, says he suspects that he chose to be the funny one because his eldest brother, Neil, was a jock and the next in line, Luke, was a brilliant student. "They were like two superheroes," O'Brien says. "What was left?" So, at 12, he became the guy on the basketball court who wouldn't settle for imitating Celtic players like all the other kids. "Conan invented athletes," recalls Luke, a lawyer and operations manager for Player Systems, a Boston computer company. Conan not only called himself "The Incredibly Violent Point Guard," but exhaustively detailed his paternity suits, contract disputes and psychological problems. "You wondered if he was more interested in the character than in the game," Luke says.
O'Brien's family thinks he's funny, but they don't exactly treat him like a comedic genius. "I go home, and it's like, 'Hey, good to see you. Now empty the dishwasher,'" he says. His girlfriend, Late Night talent coordinator Lynn Kaplan, can be just as ego-deflating. "She's real level-headed," says O'Brien. "I can amuse her at times and other times she doesn't find me that funny. That's good to have in your life."
Strumming the guitar is another source of sanity, but this spring he couldn't play for weeks. Taping a comedy bit called "Guests We'll Never Have Back," O'Brien too-enthusiastically threw himself into a mock fight between a guest and a heckler. He fell down the studio stairs, damaging ligaments in his thumb. The audience howled, and O'Brien didn't feel a thing until he got backstage. "Laughter is an anesthetic....I could get shot five times and if people think it's funny, I won't even feel it. I'll be saying 'Alright!'" he says. "The minute they stop, I'll fall down." Which helps explain why, nearly three years after being roundly hit, Conan O'Brien is still standing.
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CONAN'S CHEERS & JEERS
Nobody knows better than Conan O'Brien that television viewers have strong likes and dislikes. But what about his own? TV Guide handed over the remote and asked him to expound on some of his pet peeves and pleasures.
CHEERS to Andy Rooney, the most realistic hand puppet on TV. You could swear he's human.
JEERS to televised hurrican warnings. You're taking all the mystery out of life. The less we know, the better.
CHEERS to radio for not adding a picture. That would be copying.
JEERS to Unsolved Mystery for their tepid episode "Where Does the Sun Go at Night?" Come on, guys.
CHEERS to Mabuto Kfume, who has streamlined the legislative process in Zaire by converting the bicameral assembly to a single house. Way to go, Mabuto!
JEERS to Siskel and Ebert for having the arrogance to declare things "good" and "bad." Who do they think they are?
CHEERS to John Tesh for 10 terrific years as cohost of Entertainment Tonight. It seems like only yesterday scientists discovered your hulking frame under 50 feet of Siberian ice.
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The Richter Scale
Johnny had Ed. Dave has Paul. Conan has Andy Richter, and he's more than just a sidekick -- he's a second banana with appeal all his own. supplement to TV Guide Conan article
Andy Richter died his first time on TV -- he played a serial killer's victim for a reenactment -- so being murdered by sharp-tongued reviewers wasn't anything new for him. "I think the early criticism actually helped us," says Conan's 28-year-old sidekick. "It gave the college kids who discovered us something to rebel against." Richter has overcome such labels as "ballast" to provide a seemingly endless supply of sarcastic quips and offbeat bits (he's played Elizabeth Taylor and both Roseanne and Tom Arnold in self-penned parodies). When he takes the stage, studio audiences chant An-dee -- a sign that Richter is one big reason Late Night is hot now. "We're getting better," he admits. "That'll come when you do something 600 times. In the beginning, we were on constant heart-attack alert. Now it's 'Honey, I'm off to work.'" The former Chicago improv actor and star of the kitsch-classic stage show The Real Live Brady Bunch, says he still refuses to let his nearly instantaneous ascent to stardom go to his head. "I love the opportunity to perform, but it's still a job," he says. "I'm married [to actress Sarah Thyre] and have responsibilities. It's not as important as my personal life. Besides, I think we have this down. It's not old hat, but it is broken in." -- Mike Hammer
copyright: 1996, News America.