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By Jack Black -- Interview Magazine -- September, 2003 – Section: September View Man Conan O'Brien: when he took over late night from David Letterman, everyone wondered who the gangly redhead was. Ten years later—after some hitches and stumbles—he is arguably the funniest man on television. Here, he switches chairs with fellow sidesplitter Jack Black JACK BLACK: Hello? CONAN O'BRIEN: Two great comedy minds, finally together. JB: Head to head. Clash of the titans, as it were. CO: Superman and Aquaman. JB: Who's Aquaman? CO: I'm afraid you are. JB: [laughs] Okay. Let me start off by apologizing. You've probably been waiting by the phone for me to call. CO: I've been staring at my pink princess phone waiting for my nails to dry, wishing you would call. And I have a photograph of you, and it's in a heart-shaped frame by the side of my bed. JB: [laughs] Well, let me explain. I got scared and did some last-minute cramming. I had to approach this like a hard journalist. Now. I want to ask you some things I've prepared. Awesome questions. CO: Are these the kind like "if I lift a tree that's heavy, that means I made it?" Wait, that makes no sense. I fell apart for a second, but now I'm back. JB: [laughs] Which brings me to my first hard-hitting question, actually. It seems to me that you are the master of self-effacement. You might even be the king. The undisputed king. But the truth is, you've got the funniest show on television [Late Night With Conan O'Brien], and I'm not just blowing smoke up your ass. CO: Well, there is smoke up my ass, so did that come from you? JB: Yeah, it was me. But there's also other stuff up there. CO: There's a 1934 Lincoln penny, which is very rare. JB: What's up with that? Why do you-- CO: --Make fun of myself? I have a theory, which is that your core sense of humor and what you think is funny is formed early on. And my sense of humor was formed when I was a mediocre athlete, not that popular with the girls, coming from a big family, just this guy who was funny with my friends. Self-effacement was actually a survival tool. So if people want me to start saying "Check this guy out!" or "Wanna see something funny? Just watch the old Cona-rama!" you'd need to get in a time machine and go back to 1978 and make me an amazing athlete and a hit with the ladies. JB: You said you come from a big family. Do you have brothers and sisters? CO: Yeah. Five. JB: Were you competitive with each other? CO: I think we were competitive about being funny. And about who could throw the spear the farthest. [Black laughs] That was something my father made us do. He was a tribal chief. I read something once that Bill Murray said, that so much of his comedy education happened at the dinner table with his brothers, and that certainly is the truth with me, too. We were sitting around and someone said something funny and it made our mother and father laugh, then someone else tried to say something funnier. JB: I remember really wanting to be funny, and not being funny for most of my youth. CO: Really? That's interesting because I don't think people would guess that [about you]. When did you feel like, Hey, okay, people think I'm funny now? JB: [silence] CO: Never did, huh? [both laugh] JB: Still haven't. No, in high school sometime, when I started doing improvisational stuff. CO: I was always drawn to improv because I like being funny with other people. That's just always appealed to me. JB: You're a collaborator. CO: That sounds dirty. "Conan O'Brien was arrested for collaborating, outside, in public." Yeah. That's kind of the spirit of what we try to do on the show. If you're on the show, either you be funny or I'll be funny with you. JB: Yeah. I feel like I have to collaborate or else nothing's going to happen. I can't come up with anything until I hear someone else say something bad, and then I can fix it or tear it apart. CO: You are very abusive when you collaborate, I've noticed. JB: It's true. I have a weird temper. Do you have a fiery temper? CO: When people think of me having a temper they laugh because it's sort of like a children's party clown having a temper. But I think the thing that would surprise people the most is that when it comes to doing comedy, I am very impatient and I have this kind of classically Irish temper. JB: You get a glimpse of it when you're interviewing someone and you get mad. You can tell there's a nuclear reactor inside. CO: [laughs] I try and sublimate it as best I can, but when I get mad, I feel like I could shoot a ray out of the pupil of my eye and melt concrete. Sadly, I think that's part of being funny. JB: True. You need an edge and an anger. It's coming from a place of destruction. CO: There's a choice all comics make at some age. We come to a fork in the road, and it's like, date rapist or comedian? Personally, I chose comedian, but other people go the other way. JB: You try to think of the most harmless comedian you know, someone who is never really angry, like [Jerry] Seinfeld, but the truth is, when he makes his observations--[imitating Seinfeld] "What is it with this thing?"--there's a fury there. There's a rage inside that. CO: Right. I think that being funny is like a consolation prize for being angry or upset about some stuff when you were a kid. JB: Do you ever think about having kids yourself? CO: I'm having a child. My wife, Liza, is due in October. JB: She's preggers? How exciting! Have you done the sound-o-gram? CO: Yeah, we did the sound-o-gram. [laughs] You and your techno terms. It sounds like an Edison invention. "Place this horn up to the woman's abdomen. A loud bellowing sound will tell you it has a penis." So yeah, I'm getting into that world. [silence] And who knows what's going to happen? [more silence] My favorite parts of this interview are the sad, depressed silences. JB: Well, that's what you don't expect. CO: Or sexpect. [Black laughs] Oh! I just juiced up this interview. JB: Well, now that you've brought up sex, here goes nothing. CO: Eleven inches, dude. JB: I remember you told me once that in certain situations, your mind will drift to the worst possible thing you can do. What would be the most inappropriate, horrifying thing you've thought of doing? CO: I went to see the Knicks play the Chicago Bulls when Michael Jordan was at the height of his career. And at this point, everyone knew I was going to take over Letterman's spot, but no one had seen me do anything yet. And I remember thinking, The worst thing I could do is run out on the court and jump on Michael Jordan's back. And then I thought, Well, wait a minute, the worst thing would be if I ran out onto the court and ripped off my shirt and there was a T-shirt underneath that said "Watch me at 12:30! Better than Letterman!" [Black laughs hysterically] With the "Better than Letterman!" underlined. And then I jumped up on top of Michael Jordan's shoulders, and of course, I'm, like, 185 pounds and a big guy, so Jordan goes down hard, and his femur snaps, and the whole crowd hears this career-ending injury. [Black laughs uncontrollably] And then I start doing a dance around the fallen Jordan, pointing to the T-shirt and shouting "Watch me at 12:30! Better than Letterman!" And Jordan reaches up so I can help him to his feet, and I slap his hand away and angrily yell, "Walk it off!" [both laugh] JB: [gasps] That's one of the funniest things I've heard. Say, what's up with you and [Robert] Smigel? Is he one of the main contributors to your show? CO: He was the original head writer. He and I were both Saturday Night Live writers, and we immediately realized that we were twins separated at birth. And then when I got [Late Night], I called him up and said, "You have to be the head writer." He was here for about the first year and a half, and he's still a part of the show--he does Triumph [the Insult Comic Dog] for us, and he'll do, like, 80 percent of the voices for the lips [a frequent sketch segment]--but his major contribution was to help get the show up and running. Between us, we created the sensibility for what the show is. I feel like whenever we lose one component, it forces us to develop something else in this evolutionary way. When Robert left, it really forced me to step up and take more charge of the show, and when Andy [Richter, O'Brien's former sidekick] left [in May 2000], it forced us to say, Alright, we're going to get the show going faster at the top, and I'm going to talk directly into the camera now. JB: It's like in sports, when one of the major stars gets injured ... CO: I love when people who were never athletes start using athletic analogies. JB: [In a sportscaster's monotone voice] "When Richter left, it was like when Jordan was injured." CO: Yeah, and I'd been hobbled by a rough tackle, but then I was in the zone and I started going for gold, [Black laughs] and that's the year we won the Super Bowl. Lorne Michaels [Late Night's executive producer] said to me once, "You're a survivor." That's one of the reasons he said he picked me [to host the show]. People ask me, "How did you keep the show on the air in the beginning, when you were getting criticized and things were so rough?" and I say, "I had no choice." It's like if you're in a burning building and there's only one way out, you're going to get out through that opening or you're going to die. I literally had that level of intensity. I remember thinking, I am not going down in history as that guy who replaced Letterman and was around for three months. You can shoot me through the cerebral cortex, but I'm going to keep going. JB: It's kind of like a Depression-era approach. You know, how people who were raised during the Depression scrap and fight harder than other people. CO: True, but I have really comfortable shoes and a pretty nice car. People think, Oh, what a happy-go-lucky chap, with his funny show. But I think they'd be surprised to know that I would eat through a concrete wall if I thought it was funny and would make people happy for an hour at 12:30 at night. JB: Right. So, do you get nervous when you have to have someone on the show who's obviously lame? How do you ignore the fact that they're totally lame? CO: [laughs] If they're really lame, I'm hoping they're not on the show. But if they are, I will try to address their lameness in some way, but where it's not about me--it's not my style to say I am better than you. It sounds corny, but I'm the host and I've invited them. JB: Yeah. Because you have to interview a lot of the David Hasselhoffs of the world, because that's who people want to see. CO: I sometimes have more fun talking to those people, like Hasselhoff or Fabio, than talking to some cool, cutting-edge movie star because you don't have to take it too seriously. I mean, you can talk to Fabio about his man boobs and reach out and grab one. [Black laughs] I've always thought that there's this mistaken belief in television that you need to have the biggest-named guest to have the funniest show. So many times I've seen new talk shows start up and book giant movie stars, and I think, Those aren't the funniest people. JB: Right. No. CO: I've always taken the attitude, Let's just get funny people and try to have fun, and that'll create its own heat. So much of the time it just starts with good energy. I think if our show does one thing consistently, it's creating a mood so that people loosen up and act in a way they haven't acted in other places. We've had Harrison Ford on a couple of times, and he gets really goofy in a way that he doesn't on other shows. And I think sometimes it's because [laughs] I'm jumping around in the monologue or talking to a puppet or doing something ridiculous. "That guy has no self-esteem, so why should I?" JB: That's true. [O'Brien laughs] I'm proud of myself. I think I ripped the lid off this bitch. Do you do a lot of these interviews? CO: I'm starting to do some for this 10th anniversary, which is going be a killer show. JB: Oh! I can't believe I never even brought it up! When is that? CO: No, it's all right--this September. It's going to be an hour and a half in prime time on NBC. JB: It starts at 8? CO: It starts at 9:30 and goes to 11. JB: I guess that's prime. CO: [imitates Black] "I guess that's prime." [Black laughs] It's going to be 10 years of our best stuff, and I'm going to do some fun things with our audience. JB: Let's just hope you make it. CO: What do you mean? JB: It's a long time till September. Anything could happen. CO: That sounded evil. Are you pushing a button right now that faxes ninjas to New York City? JB: [laughs] I was going to congratulate you, but then I thought, Wait a second, it's not time yet; I have to wait till he crosses the finish line. No man, you deserve congratulations on all you've done so far. CO: Oh, thanks. [silence] Well, one of us will have to hang up. JB: Okay. I'm going to hang up right now. Take it easy. CO: Bye. Jack Black stars in School of Rock, to be released next month. COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group |