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By Michael Kilian, Chicago Tribune-- St. Louis Post-Dispatch -- August 23, 1998 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" (seen at 11:35 a.m. weeknights on Channel 5) was also editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Certainly as much sense as anything does on a show that frequently features grizzly bears in diapers and the host and co-host 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 - were the years he put in working and learning in Los Angeles improvisational theater instead of 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 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 in 1993. Some doubted that the carrot-top, beanpole Ivy Leaguer with the nasal New England voice and churlish Midwestern sidekick would 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. "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." Feeling really quirky, he once did a segment in which he wandered the scary night streets of Houston at 2:40 a.m. "I found out our show is on at 2:40 a.m. in Houston because the station manager there can make a lot of money if he delays the show and runs re runs before. So we did a remote there at 2:40 in the morning. I went to really strange, dark, dreary places like hospital emergency rooms, strip joints, bars and an abandoned bus station." His futuristic "In the Year 2000" routines are also favorites, even though 2000 is only about a year and a half away. Less popular was what he concedes was one of his worst ideas. "Remember the meteor that came to Earth and they found some organism on it?" he said. "We decided to do a whole death piece about that space organism, and none of it was funny. Nobody cared about the space organism. We didn't have a single funny take on it." Turning out so many shows a week, he 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. All his efforts will be rewarded with the broadcast of his first prime-time special, which will air at 9 p.m. on Sept. 15 on Channel 5. That date marks the fifth anniversary of the debut of his show. Copyright © 1998, St. Louis Post-Dispatch |