This Thursday’s Season 2 premiere of Conan O’Brien Must Go on the streaming service Max is reason for fans to celebrate. Not that there’s been a shortage of those recently.
His podcast is already one of classics of that burgeoning genre. He turned eating nuclear-spiced chicken wings into performance art. He hosted the Oscars, spectacularly, and has already been offered and accepted a return visit next year.
Those are just the recent hits. And somehow they are topped by a special now available on Netflix capturing hilariously sincere tributes to his career as he accepted the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center in Washington in March.
It’s not a comeback, because Conan O’Brien was never really gone. It’s more a comprehensive remastering of the original.
And “original” is pretty much Conan’s domain. Late-night television had not seen his like before him, and it hasn’t seen the same distinctive, silly-but-smart vein of comedy since. Conan is a league of one.
The theme of originality is invoked again and again in the Netflix special, by visitations from some of his show’s indelible characters—the Masturbating Bear, Brian Stack’s “Interrupter,” Brian McCann’s FedEx Pope, Will Forte’s Mark Twain (that one was just a modified take on his Ted Turner)—and by jokes from a range of comic superstars, from Stephen Colbert and Will Ferrell and Sarah Silverman and Adam Sandler and Nikki Glaser and Paul Rudd and John Mulaney, to David Letterman.
Some of the performers allude to the comparison: Conan O’Brien has had the same influence over the next generation of comedy talent that Letterman had over Conan and his generation.
I have had the privilege of interviewing, interacting with, and writing about Conan since his first public event: a press conference in 1993 to launch his selection as successor to Letterman as host of NBC’s Late Night. He was so far off the radar at that point he might as well have been a kid who wandered in off 6th Avenue and somehow got on the wrong elevator and wound up standing beside Lorne Michaels in the Rainbow Room.
He was awkward, gawky, at sea, looking a bit lost. That same impression went for how he looked at times in his early episodes as the host no one had heard of before.
But Conan was, from the jump, likeable, smart and game. He was (and remains) always, always game. And when you put that together with truly funny—off-the-wall, never-seen-before funny—you have the framework for stardom.
Certainly, more to the benefit of people like me who were chronicling it than to Conan who was living it, his journey happened to play more staccato than consistently melodious. That was partly, maybe largely, because his talent confused many with more conventional comedy expectations.
Because of that, Conan went through some things. And wound up with the scars to prove it.
Mulaney, who most directly expressed his debt to Conan for his own career (SNL writer to star performer to now his own off-beat version of a late-night show), captured the sometimes-Sisyphean trajectory of Conan’s career.
Being a fan of Conan, Mulaney said, was really stressful. “There’s always a petition to sign or some kind of goddamn protest to save him. It’s like being a fan of a recreation center in a gentrified neighborhood that developers want to tear down. There’s no argument for it, but we’re like: ‘Don’t take it away from us!’ ”
And then there was Mulaney’s fandom of the Chicago Cubs: “I know how to root for people who lose constantly.” But rooting for Conan was like “being a Cubs fan and you think the way they lost was so brilliant that they won, and you’re trying to convince the scoreboard.”
The references to the sternest test of Conan’s career, his taking over and then losing The Tonight Show over a period of 7.5 months, were mostly oblique, probably the way Conan prefers it. He has said his piece about it and made his peace with it.
But Mulaney went there. “2010, Jesus Christ, once again I have to chain myself to the tree of Conan as the bulldozers closed in.”
Having covered that time and seen what it did to Conan O’Brien, it is both jarring and gratifying to witness him losing it in laughter after that line.
Tribute shows often fall over the line from fun to cloying. Not this one. Yes, many of the performers praised and thanked Conan. Mulaney spoke for much of the lineup when he said of O’Brien’s well-documented career crises: “Adapting and innovating, and bobbing and weaving, figuring it out again and again. You did it. You won.”
What kept the cloy out of this was comedy that followed Conan’s style. Silly, goofy, but bright as a penny.
When it came time for him to speak, O’Brien celebrated the greatness of Twain, and worked in the great writer’s disdain for racism, prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness. His quote from Twain that was much cited the night of the event, had a lacerating impact at this moment in history.
“Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time, and your government when it deserves it.”
Heavy stuff for Conan, as was his closing comment that he accepted the award “in the spirit of humility, stupidity, inanity, irrelevance, fear, self-doubt, and profound, unceasing silliness.”
But then he faux-interviewed Mark Twain, and introduced a troupe of dancing Twains as he and Sandler rocked out guitar solos to “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
That was Conan O’Brien’s signature move to end the event: “unceasing silliness.”
May it continue to be so.
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Team Coco Forever.
John Mulaney’s tribute was very cathartic. “Conan was on 13-week contracts with NBC. A fact I’ve known since I was 12 years old.”
excellent article
makes me realize I have witnessed all of Conan’s twists and turns and enjoyed them immensely.