Who would have bet five years ago that a Harvard University graduate whose thesis was on “literary progeria (early senility) in the works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner” would end up one of the kings of late night TV talk show comedy?
But then, the star of NBC’s “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” also was editor of the Harvard Lampoon, so maybe it makes sense.
Certainly as much sense as anything does on a show that frequently features grizzly bears in diapers and the host and cohost cavorting in their plaid boxer shorts — or togas.
“Harvard,” says “Late Night” host O’Brien, “was basically a big waste of my time.”
What wasn’t a waste — in fact, what he credits for much of his against-the-odds, nuts-to-the-naysayers success on bedtime television — are the years he put in working and learning in Los Angeles improvisational theater instead of going to graduate school.
His “Late Night” alter ego Andy Richter came out of the Chicago school of improvisation (the Annoyance Theater, among other venues) as did a number of people behind the scenes on O’Brien’s show.
“Improv” is what critics didn’t figure on when, in 1993, O’Brien, known essentially as a comedy writer for such shows as “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live,” took over NBC’s witching-hour time slot from the network-jumping Dave Letterman as an on-camera personality in his own right.
Some doubted that the carrot-top, beanpole Ivy Leaguer with the nasal New England voice and churlish Midwestern sidekick wouldn’t last a season. But O’Brien and Richter not only got laughs, they got the last one.
“We quietly withstood all these tragic talk show deaths that happened all around us,” O’Brien said in a recent interview. “All these shows that were on when we started. Now the landscape’s kind of different. We try to keep chugging along.”
If anyone’s having a bumpy time, it’s Letterman, who gave up “Late Night” for an earlier time slot on CBS but found himself a big loser in the ensuing ratings war with O’Brien’s popular lead-in, Jay Leno.
Both Letterman and Leno are seasoned practitioners of comedy shtick, and Leno first came onto the “Tonight” Show as a veteran of the stand-up comic circuit. O’Brien’s shtick is just being himself.
“The secret of our show is that I have not become, as some people might have predicted or hoped I would, a slick television personality,” O’Brien said. “I learned how to just be the Conan O’Brien that people liked in `The Simpsons’ writers’ room, that people liked in the fifth grade.”
Being oneself, he said, isn’t always easy.
“I do it in front of a studio audience of 200 and a viewing audience of 3 million, with lights, cameras and people shouting ratings in my ear after every show,” he said. “There were skeptics, people out gunning for me, and I just learned how to be myself in that environment. You could argue that I’m almost more comfortable there than I am when I go out to a movie or out to dinner.”
He’s made his “Late Night” set “my own little world.”
“I’ve got my friend next to me, I’ve got the music I like, I have the comedy I like and I have the guests I like,” he said. “The secret to keeping the show fresh is, if I’m having a good time, the show will work.”
O’Brien attributes his love of laughs in large part to his dad, Dr. Thomas O’Brien, one of the world’s leading microbiology researchers but a comedy fan as well.
When O’Brien was growing up in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Mass., his father would take him to see comedy movies. One, playing in a Boston revival theater, was a compendium of routines from 10 of Sid Caesar’s old “Your Show of Shows” shows.
“I think I was in fifth grade, watching this sketch where Sid Caesar is sitting in the audience in a take-off on `This is Your Life.’ He refuses to go on stage. He starts to run away and people are tackling him. He’s fighting with ushers. I remember watching and thinking, that’s what I want to do. I want to be in comedy. That looks like fun.”
Instead he went to Harvard, majoring in history and literature, but quickly gravitated to the Harvard Lampoon. He parlayed that into public appearances.
“I knew I had skill at writing but it always seemed like an extension of performing,” O’Brien said. “All the time I was with the Lampoon I was always looking for ways — you know — `Gee, can I emcee that show?”‘
After college, he got a job in Los Angeles writing for a satirical program called “Not Necessarily the News,” but he quickly joined up with a local improv class, where one of his fellow students was “Friends” star Lisa Kudrow. They were together in various L.A. improv groups for three years.
Though he kept his day job as a writer, the improvisational experience more than prepared him for his big break before the cameras.
“The ace in my pocket when I got this job was that I had been for years been getting up in front of people doing improvisation,” he said.
Improv has also helped him get more out of guests than most shows do.
“Improvisation is a style of acting and performing that teaches you to listen,” he said. “I try to be funny with the guest and make them part of it. We get our share of people on the talk show circuit, but we’re different. The last time (director) Martin Scorsese and I were on the show, Andy and I were wearing togas. It was a different environment and he was hysterical.”
O’Brien has had baseball legend and personal hero Ted Williams on — and of course improv chum Kudrow. But his major emphasis is not on talk but comedy.
“We do two routines a night, some nights more, some nights less,” he said. “For some reason, there are days when the writers are just overflowing with ideas. The week’s news will give them a million opportunities. Sometimes there are weeks where the only news is tragic — somebody died, somebody else died. You can’t really go near those areas, and nothing else is really going on. The main story in the news is about an agriculture report.”
Though his show is done in New York, he likes to involve the rest of the country. Hence what has become one of his favorite bits: having a “Midwestern Count Down” to midnight on New Year’s Eve.
“We had lots of characters and silliness and did lots of jokes about the Midwest and I think it worked out pretty well,” he said. “It’s the quirky kind of thing our show would do.”
Turning out five shows a week, O’Brien thinks he should be judged like Ted Williams or basketball star Michael Jordan — on averages.
“I could put together quite a reel of things that didn’t work, but I think our average is pretty good,” O’Brien said. “We try so many things I’ve always been surprised at the number of things that work. We take a lot of chances.”
