Tommy Blacha didn’t arrive at Late Night with Conan O’Brien with a polished packet full of ready-to-air sketches. In fact, by his own telling, he did the opposite.
“I just kind of went off the rails,” Blacha says on this week’s episode of LateNighter’s Inside Late Night podcast, describing a submission filled with surreal, non-sequitur ideas inspired by Monty Python.
That approach—initially more confusing than useful to the show—ultimately helped define Blacha’s voice in one of late night’s most experimental writers’ rooms. Not all of his weird, high-energy ideas made it to air, but some did—including fan-favorite oddities like Pimpbot and the memorably absurd “Gaseous Wiener,” along with contributions to recurring bits like “Actual Items,” where his offbeat sensibility could thrive within the show’s format.
He also talks about bringing pro wrestlers onto Late Night at a time when the medium was still viewed as lowbrow, collaborating with Robert Smigel on TV Funhouse, and serving as a guest writer on Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s first Saturday Night Live hosting stint.
Looking back, Blacha—who would go on to work with Sacha Baron Cohen on Da Ali G Show before creating Metalocalypse on Adult Swim—describes his Late Night years as a crash course in how to channel his instincts into a collaborative environment—without losing the weirdness that got him there in the first place.
Click the embed above to listen to Tommy Blacha’s full conversation with Mark Malkoff now, or find Inside Late Night on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
