Michael Koman is the co-creator of Peacock’s The Paper with Greg Daniels. But long before that—and before he co-created Nathan for You or wrote for Saturday Night Live—he spent seven years writing for Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
Getting that job, he says, required remarkably little conversation.
While Koman was writing for Mad TV, fellow writer and former Conan staffer Greg Cohen recommended him to head writer Mike Sweeney. Koman submitted a packet, heard nothing, and assumed he hadn’t made the cut after learning someone else had already interviewed.
Then came a call telling him he’d been hired.
“I had never talked to anyone,” Koman tells Mark Malkoff on this week’s episode of LateNighter’s Inside Late Night podcast. Not long before he left for New York, Sweeney finally called and told him, “I guess we should talk.”
Koman arrived at Late Night in 2001 and became part of a writing staff with an unusual amount of freedom. Looking back, he says his only regret is that he didn’t take even greater advantage of it.
Among the ideas Koman helped bring to the show was the “Walker, Texas Ranger Lever,” which began with the flimsy premise that a corporate merger gave NBC access to clips from the Chuck Norris series. Koman expected it to be a one-off. Instead, Conan’s pulls of the lever became one of the show’s most beloved recurring bits.
Koman also recalls an effortless writing partnership with Brian Stack that produced characters including The Interrupter, and the day Conan showed up unannounced at Koman’s apartment while he was home sick with strep throat.
The show changed Koman’s life in another way: it’s where he met his future wife, Ellie Kemper. “My entire life came from that show,” he says.
Also in the conversation: Koman discusses joining Saturday Night Live midseason and unexpectedly clicking with office-mate Pete Davidson, working briefly at The Colbert Report during the 2008 election, and co-creating Nathan for You—including the gas-station segment that produced one of the rare moments Nathan Fielder broke on camera.
Click the embed above to listen to Mark Malkoff’s full conversation with Michael Koman now, or find Inside Late Night on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
