BOOKS AND ARTS DECEMBER 3, 2010
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“Welcome to my second annual first show,” said Conan O’Brien in the recent premiere of his new late-night talk show on TBS. Also: “People asked me why I named the show ‘Conan.’ I did it so I’d be harder to replace.” His first episode opened with a video of an unemployed O’Brien being hounded by a haggard wife and 14 kids, then gunned down by Godfather-style NBC hitmen. And, as the weeks progressed, the self-pity has persisted. “I don’t know if you know my story—I worked for a long time in network television,” he said through gritted teeth in a recent sketch.
The show is all about Conan, down to that iconic red coif on the logo. Just over three weeks in, he still peppers his monologue with asides about how “crazy” the last year has been for him. He recently led a roomful of cable technicians in a rowdy cheer: “Who we gonna kill? Network television!” And this fixation on his alleged plight also defined Conan’s act in the months leading up to his TBS debut, following the fracas with NBC that left him—after barely seven months as The Tonight Show’s host—nursing his battered pride and on the market for another gig.
O’Brien’s slide into chronic self-referentiality isn’t new in the comedy world. Most famously, it also plagued comic Lenny Bruce after he was arrested for obscenity at a San Francisco nightclub in 1961. Bruce’s outrage became his only source of material. In his stand-up routines, he quoted at length from his trial transcript. He obsessively detailed the charges against him. His shtick, tinged with real bitterness, was exhausting. And suddenly he wasn’t funny anymore.
Of course, the analogy ends there. Bruce sank further into gloom until he died of a morphine overdose in 1966, while O’Brien walked away with a severance package worth more than $30 million and was promptly handed a new show. In O’Brien’s case, it’s been his rise to pop icon status—and the victim complex he’s nurtured along the way—that has made him decidedly less funny.
Last May, O’Brien made his first post-Tonight Show television appearance in an interview with 60 Minutes. He sounded sullen and angry. His new beard seemed to suggest he was a castaway back from a few rough months on a desert island. “I went through some stuff,” he said. “I got very depressed at times.” Thus emerged the new “Conan” brand, one built on O’Brien’s supposed martyrdom—a patently offensive idea in light of his massive payoff and our nearly 10 percent unemployment rate. “I’m with Coco” T-shirts and Facebook profile photos abounded. O’Brien made YouTube videos answering questions from viewers and racked up almost two million Twitter followers.
During his brief hiatus from television, O’Brien performed around the country in the “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television” tour. In his routine, he outlined the “stages of mourning” for former late-night talk show hosts and strummed along to lyrics such as “They threw me out/It happened fast/They said ‘Please don’t let the door/Hit your freckled Irish ass.’” It all seemed less like a comedy routine than a therapy session for both O’Brien and his supporters—a chance for him to freely indulge his bruised ego. The fans who flocked to these live performances were young, Web-savvy, and, like O’Brien, riled up by a sense of gross injustice.
On TBS’s “Conan,” martyrdom is still the brand. The show feels like a nightly kick in the groin to NBC. But the host also slaps at his new network. In his Thanksgiving show, he said, “I’m happy to be on cable now, it’s not a problem,” then slipped a flask out of his coat and took a long swig. “I don’t know if you remember, but, on my old network, that I worked at for a long time, we had NBC chimes,” he said in another recent episode, before launching into an adolescent joke about TBS’s decision to coin its own audio trademark: a loud bodily noise whenever someone says the network’s name.
The TBS putdowns are in poor taste. When O’Brien riffs on his diminished paycheck or the lowbrow nature of basic cable, it’s uncomfortable to watch him. This doesn’t jive with the spirit of the late-night talk show, which aims to make viewers feel privy to a cozy and casual chat. Johnny Carson excelled at the business of putting his guests—and thus his viewers—at ease. His jokes were chummy and he never stole the spotlight. Even Jay Leno built his brand on providing a kind of backdrop for flashier personalities. It might not be fun to watch Leno, but it is comfortable. His style is unobtrusive. O’Brien, sitting beside a celebrity guest, is a competing spectacle.
Granted, in the past, O’Brien’s antics have worked to his advantage. His creativity, wit, and goofball charm made Late Night likeable and consistently fresh. His self-deprecation had less desperation. But the new Conan is a different kind of act: too convinced of the urgency of his own plight.
On “Conan,” even his guests participate in ribbing him. Ricky Gervais filmed a segment preemptively congratulating Conan on future gigs with “The Food Network” and “Good Morning Dayton.” Then Tom Hanks—accused of coining the nickname “Coco”—said, “Finally [Conan] will blame something on someone other than Jay.” Often the mood is congratulatory. “Wow,” Eva Mendes told O’Brien earnestly last week, “this is so much better than your last gig.” In any case, it all seems engineered to remind us that the NBC saga is the bedrock on which “Conan” was built.
The media are in part to blame for the new Conan and the self-righteous fervor of his fans. They tracked the whole Conan versus Leno mess as if it were of international interest and characterized the fallout in Homeric terms. The Times headlines charted it obsessively: “Agreement Expected in NBC’s Talks With O’Brien,” “NBC wants Leno back in old slot,” “O’Brien Rejects NBC Shift: He’s Set to Say Good Night.” High drama was wrung from the timeline of late-night TV programming: NBC’s proposal to move The Tonight Show from 11:35 to 12:05, Conan galled by the prospect of a post-midnight Tonight Show, Leno reinstated at 11:35.
This whole preoccupation with scheduling felt mostly symbolic. DVR, Hulu, and YouTube have done away with the singular importance of the time slot. We can handpick clips to watch online and reshuffle programming to suit our own schedules by pressing “record.” And there is no longer much of a place for the generalized subject matter and stock formula of the late-night talk show—the monologue, interviews with movie stars who have a new project to hawk, a few interspersed sketches. Modern attention spans are too slim to accommodate bald self-promotion from celebrities and too readily able to seek customized entertainment elsewhere. Now, niche-iness is key, which is why Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are so popular. They are emphatically topical; Leno and Letterman, when it comes to shaping the national conversation, tend to be beside the point.
With these odds against him, Conan has still managed to climb to new, iconic heights. He became the spiritual leader of a hollow movement in which a breached NBC contract was a moral cause. Like Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” “I’m with Coco” was a pseudo-movement pitching itself as an attempt to rise above the fray and offer something nobler, more in touch with the people. And, like the Stewart rally, it was less a demonstration of any real principle than a publicity stunt. Now, the ethos behind TBS’s “Conan” is the same: comedy uncomfortably mingled with a sense of real aggrievement.
Today, pseudo-movements are easy to assemble. A cult of personality can be cobbled together from some YouTube clips and a Twitter feed. Influence is more about visibility than ideology, and so entertainment and politics have become weirdly conflated. Stewart’s rally was good fun when he and Colbert were strutting around in American flag sweaters and belting off-key duets. It lost its punch at Stewart’s earnest closing speech: “Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder. To see you here today, and the kind of people that you are, has restored mine.” His ambitions of real moral leadership killed the comedy act. And the comedy act killed his ambitions of real moral leadership. For O’Brien, too, self-righteousness undermined the act.
Lenny Bruce, at least, stood for something. He was a first-amendment crusader, dangerously profane and pushing real boundaries. O’Brien is a martyr without a cause. “I don’t want what happened in January to define me,” he told Playboy in a recent interview. “I’m trying to take the high road.” He would be wise to take his own advice.
Laura Bennett is assistant literary editor of The New Republic.
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22 comments
I think you just prove that egg heads are humorless. Or perhaps it's your age, perhaps? A generational divide? I met Conan years ago when he was still on the Simpsons. He has always been self-referential and always lived for attention. The first time I ever met him he did shtick. And it was kind of mind-blowing because I never seen anything like it. He's an original. That's not to say he isn't being a child about his rift with NBC, I'll give you that.
- MOLLYSIMON
December 3, 2010 at 12:32am
Regular people may not connect to what Conan is going through professionally -- it's a small club -- but they can connect to what he is feeling -- disappointment, anger, and shame -- universal emotions. Like all great comics, Conan exploits his own resentment for laughs. Laura Bennett's resentment of Conan misses the point not only of Conan, but of comedy.
- christophershinn
December 3, 2010 at 12:47am
I don't know about all this analysis of Conan, too self referential, his hollow movement, above the fray or whatever. He seems like a smart, decent guy. But I found his show a bore back in the day when I watched late night talk shows. Curiousity got me to watch his first show of course and his second and then I started yawning again. He's just the same flat guy he was before at NBC who couldn't keep his ratings up; and once the hullballoo and novlety pass, I predict his ratings will drop, not that I wish him any ill. Not for nothing, but Leno and Letterman should give it up already. I don't much like Craig Ferguson--talk about self referential. On the other hand, for the odd moments when I'm cruising up and down the channels, taking a break from perfecting my pleiades, I like Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, the latter of whom reminds me of every guy I hung out with and shot the shit with on the block when I was a kid--one of the boys so to speak.
- basman
December 3, 2010 at 12:54am
It's OK that Ms. Bennett doesn't enjoy Conan's schtick, but it's not really a departure for him to cast himself as a downtrodden mensch whose scrappy little show gets pushed around by the big guys. Even back on Late Night he would frequently mock-lament his show's low budget and lack of promotion by NBC in order to introduce comedy bits -- it helped win over his target audience of young smart-asses. I think the key paragraphs of this column are the ones where O'Brien is held up to the standard of Carson and Leno and found wanting because his brand of late-night comedy isn't "comfortable." Well, Dave Letterman's comedy isn't "comfortable" either, and there are plenty of people who prefer Letterman's New York sass and absurdity to Leno's L.A. cool and affability. For that matter, Letterman is no stranger to throwing dirty laundry with his employers (and former employers) up on the air for comedic purposes -- sometimes in the form of "kidding on the square." To my mind, that's the late-night tradition Conan O'Brien is heir to, not Carson and Leno. Maybe it's not to your taste, but with Conan's target audience, the sharper edge is not a liability, it's an asset. A shorter version of this column might run something like "I have never liked Conan O'Brien's brand of comedy, and it kind of bothers me that more people are paying attention to him than ever before."
- austinexpat
December 3, 2010 at 8:26am
Basman. You've captured the very content and tenor of a discussion my wife and I were having just the other day. It was a fairly short discussion, too. Yep.
- jacko
December 3, 2010 at 8:32am
I once knew a man who owned a very traditional men's clothing store, a place where men would meet to discuss sports, family, sort of like a neighborhood bar without the drinks. The feeling, and conversation, was always the same. A very comfortable place. After college I moved to another city and rarely visted the store. But when I did, it was as though I never left. Indeed, the owner of the store had the uncanny ability to remember our last conversation and to pick up where we left off, as though it were only last week rather than two years before. That was the Johnny Carson show, a place you could visit rarely but feel as though you never left, the jokes, the set, everything as recognizable and comfortable as when you last visited. At a certain age each of us becomes "a man of the past", those who are still what we were, as distinguished from those who have changed. But as perceptive readers of TNR know, those who embrace change are men of the present age, and by changing they always remain the same. Carson was a show for a man of the past; Conan is a show for a man of the present age.
- rayward
December 3, 2010 at 9:03am
When does the ' sharper edge ' become a tedious posturing?
- jacko
December 3, 2010 at 11:34am
I DO find it surprising that anyone likes Conan. The commercials leading up to the new show and now the AmEx commercials. I'm all, like, "WTF"?
- ericad
December 3, 2010 at 11:43am
Rayward: "Carson was a show for a man of the past; Conan is a show for a man of the present age." That so perfectly encapsulates the entire argument, at least for me. Basman, I found Conan boring on NBC, but his going to cable has let him do crazier stuff that I guess you either like or you don't. We Tivo it and let our kids watch, and the four of us are inevitably howling. Also, his stuff is never mean, it's never cheap, it's never (or rarely) blue, and his physical comedy is to me amazing. And his facial expressions are dead on. He's basically a tall dork who manages somehow to move as well as Jim Carrey. I don't like Jim, but I do recognize his ability to do all sorts of pretzel things that make him seem award even though he's anything but. But to all his detractors, I will say he's incredibly self-referential. That's him, even before he was famous. And you either like it or don't.
- MOLLYSIMON
December 3, 2010 at 12:07pm
Austinexapt is right on. "It might not be fun to watch Leno, but it is comfortable." Just what I'm looking for from comedy (no). It's just TV and a matter of differing taste, but the whole premise here is weak. Except for the beard, Conan's show is pretty much what's it's always been you either get it or you don't.
- Pnaut
December 3, 2010 at 4:43pm
Jacko our new girl friend Esperenza Spaulding is the first jazz singer to be nominated for best artist of the year grammy!
- basman
December 3, 2010 at 4:46pm
This column reminds me of a running conversation I've had with my mother for decades. The TV will be on The Office/SNL/Arrested Development/some other show I'm watching and she'll say, "I thought you liked humor. This is not funny." "Yes it is, Mom -- hear me laughing? It's not your sense of humor, but it is funny." When we get together for the holidays, perhaps I'll turn Conan on to reignite the discussion. And when she tells me Conan's not funny I can give her my usual reply and then add, "And there's someone at TNR that agrees with you!" At least I can trust her not to make up a silly strawman about The Meaning Of It All.
- W_Bombay
December 3, 2010 at 4:59pm
Late night variety shows in general are so over now anyway. Most aren't funny. Topical humor is done much better with more edginess elsewhere. And is there anything more boring than sitting through celebrity interviews? The only reason I even tune in for any of these shows is occasionally for the last 5 mins to see a musical act I like. And that's more out of habit. I could see that on Youtube the next day.
- john_ellis
December 3, 2010 at 5:00pm
Laura, I will cut him slack because the show is still new, and I think he's smarter than to stubbornly cling to an act, that will get old quickly. Part of the schtick is ya know, irony. That's what makes it ridiculous to him and his fans: he's so obviously not a martyr, not someone who is going to be seriously put out by what happened to him. His "self-pity" is an act, a come-on and none of it's sincere: it's a joke. It's the "oh yeah right Conan, you are a martyr!" aspect that gets people going, like they are all in on the joke. O.K. maybe you don't like the humor, but there is nothing serious about it. Not sure you get that. "I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me." - Conan O'Brien No one feels sorry for Conan, least of all himself.
- silentbeep
December 3, 2010 at 5:00pm
Itz. I'm well pleased that Esperenza is on her way. She not only delivers in spades, the method by which she does is uncanny. Now as you know I'm a musician. Not bad I might add. Some things I can kick ass on but...... I would never attempt to sing intricate melody while playing lead but for the occasional matching scat shtik ala say,,, George Benson. This woman does perform essentially counterpoint in vocals and instrumentation. Very, very well I might add. When she performs there is a whole lot of stuff going on in that noodle that needs to be kept separate yet whole. That is her genius. And... she does it effortlessly. In love.... indeed. If I were thirty years younger......
- jacko
December 3, 2010 at 5:25pm
Conan was always funniest when he was out in the field with a camera crew, talking off the top of his head. That's when the set-piece humor falls away, and the true improvisational comedy takes place. He's done a little of that in the new show, but not enough. In Conan's old (first) show, following the Tonight Show, Triumph the Insult Comedy Dog was absolutely hilarious. And sometimes when O'B interviewed a celebrity on a monitor, some genuine wit came through. He's never been a good interviewer, but, then, almost no one in late night tv now is a good interviewer. Carson was perhaps the best interviewer in the history of late night television. I can't watch Leno--he's almost never funny. I tried watching Fallon, but he comes across as so measured and stilted (even if likeable), that I can't take him for more than a minute or two. Letterman in the old days (following Carson at NBC) was often very funny. Now he appears to have turned into the kind of late-show host he himself had mocked, to great effect, early in his career. He's still better than Leno, but watching traffic is better than watching Leno. Craig Ferguson is probably the most original of the current late-night hosts. His puppet shows are hilarious. And he relaxes into himself in a way that almost no one on late night tv does (with the exception, as noted above, of Conan when he takes a camera crew out into the field). CF, though, is never as funny doing anything that's been rehearsed, such as a skit. But, luckily, much of the show is unscripted. I'd watch Ferguson before watching any of the above. There are also two other hilarious comedians on late at night: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. But I would put both of these in a different category than all of the others. These two, Stewart and Colbert, actually do comedy with content. They do genuine--and often genuinely funny, genuinely biting--satire. Stewart's pieces on Glenn Beck, for instance, are priceless gems of comedic art, and also searing and pointed satire. And the pieces he did over the course of eight long years during the Bush administration literally helped me maintain my sanity. Colbert is perhaps the quickest and most brilliant improvisational mind on tv. His show, unlike Conan's or even Stewart's, did not noticeably suffer during the writers strike a few years back. And as with JS, SC's satire is biting, often content-driven, and often hilarious. Even today, both Stewart and Colbert say what no one else on tv--even on the supposedly serious news & chat shows--has the balls, or intelligence, to say. In terms of analyzing--while satirizing--the obscenity that is Fox News and Sarah Palin and the Tea Party and the other nuts in the GOP, as well as the deballed Dems in congress. Simply put, if nothing else is on (or is in repeats), I would watch Conan. I might reluctantly watch Letterman. I never watch Leno or Fallon. I greatly enjoy Ferguson. But Stewart and Colbert are necessities, especially in the absence of any consistently or seriously intelligent commentary on the network or cable news or chat shows.
- BenNevis
December 3, 2010 at 8:34pm
That should have been: And sometimes [during his first NBC show] when O'Brien interviewed a celebrity on a monitor--the image of a celebrity with some backstage comedian literally putting words in that celebrity's mouth--some genuine wit came through.
- BenNevis
December 3, 2010 at 8:37pm
When does the ' sharper edge ' become a tedious posturing? Jack
- jacko
December 3, 2010 at 8:52pm
I'm serious. When will you stinkin whippersnappers understand the moment? Y'all think that you are the first to discover the hard edge on things? It's that kind of conceit that makes all of these truly original talents with their brave bullshit sell as original. It's the same old shit going back thousands of years. Congrats on the originality.
- jacko
December 3, 2010 at 9:10pm
Ironical..... Not very funny..... I know. Sorry. Had a few. I'll leave the hijinx to the prose.
- jacko
December 4, 2010 at 12:56pm
I don't object to this shtick. Late-night talk show hosts, including Conan, use -- and wear out -- running gags of all sorts all the time, and there's nothing that makes this running gag inferior to any other. I liked Conan on Late Night. His new show, however, isn't clicking so far. It's hard to say why. I have nothing against Andy Richter, and I think he's funny, but, as on the old show, the pairing may not work. His function seems to be to interrupt with a decent joke that throws off the rhythm and injects awkwardness. The jokes and gags don't seem as sharp generally. His guests are doomed to be leftovers. Basic cable's a problem. The 12:35 NBC slot was perfect for him, and he probably could have made a go of Tonight if given more of a chance. p.s. A bugaboo of mine: The word you want, meaning "fit," is not "jive," but "jibe."
- JakeH
December 4, 2010 at 7:50pm
Well said. I've always been a Conan fan, but this article hits the nail on the head. I hope the writers take note and tone down the references to "poor Conan." Tongue-in-cheek as they're intended to be, the self-pity feels all too real.
- rb61049
December 5, 2010 at 2:01pm