Conan O’Brien Must Go

Comedian Conan O’Brien (b. 1963) has been in show business for about 40 years, and he’s been known to the wider public for about 30 of those. By rights, I ought to hate him more (I’ll get to why), yet I don’t like him with any great mountain of enthusiasm, either. Long is the list of comedians and television hosts who amuse me or speak to me more. Perhaps Conan exists because the canvas needed a little red, I dunno. But he is there and April 18 is his date of birth. He must be reckoned with.

Why ought I to hate him more? Because I value American show biz tradition, which historically was an avenue of advancement for the working class. It may have been a steep and narrow street, fraught with booby traps and highway robbers, but it was a way of reaching success for the hearty and the lucky. In recent decades, however, it has been much less that. Some folks from the bottom do manage to make their way through, but increasingly it’s an aristocracy, already possessed by those “to the manor born”. O’Brien isn’t from a show biz family, but he was definitely born on third base. His mother was a lawyer and partner at a global law firm, his father a doctor and a professor of medicine at Harvard. This background gave Conan two advantages: 1) plenty of dough and connections; and 2) he inherited brains and ability. He was the valedictorian of his class at Brookline High School, won a national short story writing contest, and was a congressional page for Barney Frank. He then went to Harvard, where he was president of the Lampoon, wrote his senior thesis on William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, and graduated magnum cum laude. I…don’t wish him ill. But someone with this background can choose any number of paths in life and be happy. O’Brien had to go and take up one of the few dozen chairs in show business.

Once TV comedy was the province of guys who’d come up through vaudeville and night clubs, or else the rough-and-tumble world of print journalism (back when that, too, required no college degree) or the scrappy early days of radio. Yale educated Dick Cavett was the first to alter that dynamic, and he used to sort of seem apologetic about his background. Later, there were all those National Lampoon guys at Saturday Night Life, and going forward it seemed as though the floodgates were open. Being a TV writer, a province once ruled by the likes of Doc Simon, Nat Hiken, and Paul Henning, was now a profession that sought candidates with fancy academic credits.

So Conan has this charmed career. He got a job writing for Not Necessarily the News right out of college (1983), then wrote for The Wilton North Report (1987), Saturday Night Live (1988-91) and The Simpsons (1991-94). In the late ’80s he put on a live revue in Chicago with fellow SNL writers Bob Odenkirk and Robert Smigel called Happy Happy Good Show. With Smigel, he also wrote and produced a legendary pilot for a TV series starring Adam West called Lookwell in 1991, though it wasn’t picked up.

Then in 1993 Conan emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, to take over for David Letterman as the host of Late Night. (His first name amused us at first, back before we remembered its Celtic origins. We just associated it with a dumb Arnold Schwarzenegger movie). Apparently Garry Shandling had been offered the Late Night job, but turned it down. Garry Shandling and Letterman are both examples of comedians I love a lot and can gush about effortlessly and with enthusiasm. This is why I say I wish I liked Conan O’Brien more. Still, I warmed up to him fine on Late Night. He was clearly selected for his offbeat sense of humor, which seemed a reasonable, if lesser, fit to succeed Letterman. Conan tapped drummer Max Weinberg from Springsteen’s E Street Band to be musical director. Smigel brought bits like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog to the show. And Andy Richter became Conan’s sidekick.

As host, Conan has never been the disaster some dimwits have made him out to be. He conducts interviews better than most (in the substantive tradition of Jack Paar), he’s great at playing the straight man in comedy bits, and he comes out with clever extemporizations as the need arises. Standing 6’4″, with that enormous red pompadour, and a fondness for slick suits, he makes a strong visual impression. It seems to me that he sort of pioneered the dandy-ish and costly-looking personal style emulated by a lot of Millennials. At the same time, he’s always been a little ill-at-ease. I suppose it might be taken as a complement if I call Conan a cross between Ed Sullivan and Elvis Presley, but what I really means by saying that, is that, like both those personalities, he is fidgety, nervous, self conscious, and self-deprecating. So am I, so I don’t make of that the deal breaker some people seem to. Woody Allen crafted an entire act out of those qualities, and one can make a long list of those who possess them, and hopefully transgress them. So honestly, critics would have had to do better than that in criticizing O’Connor to get any traction with me, and they generally didn’t.

After a rough start, Conan found his niche in that Late Night slot, hosting the program for over 15 years. Then in 2009, the famousTonight Show debacle. Jay Leno stepped down as host and started a new prime time program. As host of Late Night, Conan seemed the natural person to inherit the Tonight Show post, and so he was promoted. But then…the Tonight Show audience went insane-? Granted The Tonight Show is a more conservative platform than the programs that come on in later time slots. That’s the reason why Leno got the Tonight Show gig rather than the far superior Letterman. Older people watch The Tonight Show. Not only does Middle America not get such comic strategies as sarcasm, irony, wit, or non sequitur, they tend to hate and distrust them. So much the worse for Conan.

On top of that, the wider audience seemed to hate Conan on a visceral level. They didn’t like how he looked. And granted he does look weird. To me, he’s always resembled Beavis and Butt-head. Or the kid from Deliverance. A cross between Carrot Top and one of the lesser Kennedys? So people were savage and, may I say, irrational in their response to seeing Conan behind the Tonight Show desk. Viewership fell off by the millions. This was bewildering to me, because I liked Conan far better than Leno as host, and certainly liked him well enough on his own merits. Even more perplexing to me was the mystery of how these millions of people didn’t seem to already know him or his comedy. Like AT ALL. Yet he was on directly after The Tonight Show for FIFTEEN YEARS. None of this audience stuck around a few minutes extra to check out the next show, like, EVER? I mean, most people really are stuck in pathetic ruts!

The audience is never wrong? Nah, that’s nonsense. Mobs of people, like individuals, are frequently wrong, and in this case they were roughly insane. The show was so bad that you would stop watching The Tonight Show with all its tradition and all of those celebrity guests? Give me a break! Did the viewers share my class biases against Conan? I doubt it, I didn’t even know about his posh background until fairly recently. I just think they had some kind of caveman reaction to how he looked and spoke. Maybe he didn’t kiss enough audience ass. Whatever it was, after a few months, he was fired and Leno came back until they producers landed Jimmy Fallon. This all feels like it happened a million years ago, but it has only been fifteen.

Conan landed on his feet, though at a much lower rung of the ladder, by hosting Conan on TBS from 2010 to 2021. It was not a very inspiring show. From having been “too edgy” he became too square! In my 2020 piece ranking the late night hosts, I put Conan last. This was probably unfair (he’s hardly the least funny or least talented) but in that post I was largely responding to how the various shows were navigating the madness abroad in the land in the age of Trump, and he seemed way behind the pack. Honestly, I find the entire late night talk show format fairly reactionary and obsolete in the DIY age of TikTok. The only talk show I watch regularly and with genuine enthusiasm these days is Hanging with Doctor Z., and you can take that to the bank. (Speaking of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog — he was the Doctor’s most recent guest!)

As for Conan, he launches his new show Conan O’Brien Must Go on Max TODAY. Yes, Conan’s birthday present to himself is a new TV show! And thus the title of this post is not my OWN statement of damnation, it’s his own. He gets a lot of mileage from playing Ringo. Conan O’Brien Must Go is a travel show, building on the remote segments he used to do on Conan and as stand-alone specials. But this, too, seems like a pretty exhausted genre, one that will require some kind of new blood transfusion to be interesting. I would never proclaim that the man must go. But he’ll definitely need to do something to make me show up.

For more on show biz history, including tv variety, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.