One of Conan O’Brien’s signature moves was nearly eliminated by Lorne Michaels.
The SNL creator apparently was not a fan of the host’s “string dance,” in which O’Brien mimes pulling his hips up with invisible strings, cutting the strings, then licks his finger and rubs it around his nipple while emitting a sizzle sound.”
That’s according to Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, author Susan Morrison’s extensive new biography. In the book, Morrison mentions an “early suggestion” that O’Brien got from Michaels during his Late Night with Conan O’Brien days “about losing [the] signature Conan move.”
Michaels, of course, served as executive producer on O’Brien’s Late Night, basically plucking the former SNL writer from obscurity and installing him as host of the show. Morrison—who notes that Michaels “hadn’t spent much time at Conan’s Late Night,” over the years—writes that O’Brien “didn’t always take Michaels’ notes.” The suggestion to drop the string dance was one of those notes O’Brien declined.
Morrison also recounted the anecdote in an interview on Dana Carvey and David Spade’s Fly on the Wall podcast released this week. Unable to recall if it had been O’Brien, Michaels, or both who had told her this, Morrison said, “Lorne was always telling Conan to get rid of that string dance thing that he did, where he would touch his nipples and go ssss,” imitating a sizzling sound. “Lorne hated that. But Conan stuck with it and it worked.”
O’Brien’s string dance became a part of the host’s nightly repertoire through multiple shows, through the end of his late-night run in 2021. (At the end of O’Brien’s Late Night tenure, the invisible strings were even briefly stolen by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report, resulting in a string dance-off on O’Brien’s show.)
As Morrison says of the dance on Fly on the Wall, “There are people, I guess, who like it.”
