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By Gary Levin -- USA Today -- September 11, 2003 -- Section: Life, page 3D NEW YORK -- Conan O'Brien, dad? Impossible as it may seem, the boyish, pompadoured Late Night host -- and beacon of comedy for college students and assorted insomniacs -- is due to become a dad next month at 40. After a taping last week that didn't go especially well, O'Brien is holed up in his cluttered, nondescript warren in NBC's Rockefeller Center headquarters. He's nervous. Should he and his wife, Liza, who were married last year, find out the child's gender? (No, it's decided.) Will a family interfere with his ambition? Apparently not. "My obsession to try to be amusing at 12:30 at night is not going to magically go away because I have a kid. I'm just going to have to make it work." This week, he's obsessing over another milestone: Late Night's 10th anniversary, to be celebrated with a 90-minute prime-time special Sunday (9:30 p.m. ET/PT) on NBC. It will be taped Friday. Former sidekick Andy Richter and pals Jack Black and Will Ferrell will join him at New York's Beacon Theater, along with the inevitable clips from Conan's wacky world: * Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a cigar-smoking hand puppet who once asked a geeky Star Wars fan whether he ever had spoken to a woman without first providing a credit-card number. * Those portraits of Bush, Clinton and Arnold with someone else's moving lips, a riff on crudely animated 1960s cartoon Clutch Cargo. * The infamous masturbating bear. * Conan, shining a flashlight under his chin as he predicts the future. * "If They Mated," in which celebrity couples are freakishly morphed to approximate their offspring. "So much of our show is not topical; we just invent stuff out of whole cloth," he says. "There's a visual childlike silliness to some of it that I think is really creative." Back in 1993, it all seemed just plain weird. O'Brien, an unknown comedy writer at Saturday Night Live and later The Simpsons, was plucked from obscurity and anointed the successor to David Letterman. (Letterman bolted for CBS a year after NBC chose Jay Leno to replace Johnny Carson.) Critics savaged the show as a bore and complained about doughy Richter and the tiny set. Worse, NBC suits nearly canceled the show, reluctantly doling out a series of 13-week pardons that kept O'Brien on a short leash. Looking back, executive producer Jeff Ross seems slightly jealous -- though not surprised -- that Craig Kilborn, Jimmy Kimmel and other late-night newcomers have escaped such scrutiny. "These other shows can come on in late-night quietly and find their way," Ross says. "With us it was all really about 'How dare this guy replace Letterman?' Regardless of how good the show was going to be, it was like the world was coming to an end." It didn't help that the gangly, 6-foot-4 redhead initially made a fumbling, stiff and awkward transition from behind-the-scenes writer to on-camera performer. But gradually, O'Brien's edgy humor won fans, especially among a core group of male, college-age viewers who wanted a Dave to call their own. Last year, O'Brien won praise as host of the Emmy Awards, and he has won more exposure with next-day reruns of Late Night on Comedy Central at noon and 6 p.m. ET/PT. His NBC ratings have held steady at 2.5 million viewers, beating those upstarts on other networks. So looking back, O'Brien figures his trial by fire wasn't all bad. "Sure, it helps me to a certain degree, because you always root for the hero that got the crap beat out of him in the beginning. It's like Clint Eastwood, you know. They tried to hang him, and in the end he killed everybody and he's still around. I just don't like it when it prevents people from looking at what we've accomplished." Now he lusts after Leno's spot but realizes that seat won't be empty anytime soon: "If someday it were possible for me to do The Tonight Show, that would be an amazing opportunity." Meantime, he's content with spotlighting his show's greatest hits for potential fans beyond his loyalists. "I want to be able to show this to my eye-rolling, cynical 16-year-old son or daughter someday and have him say, 'OK, he was pretty funny.' I think it's gonna be the best thing we've done yet, and that's worth 90 minutes of someone's time." Caption: PHOTO, B/W, Kevin Winter, Getty Images Caption: Conan: A child on the way won't slow him down. |