Late Night Without Conan O'Brien

In the last twenty-eight years I graduated from high school and then the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I became a staff writer for The A.V Club while I was still in college and rose to the level of head writer before leaving to be a staff writer for The Dissolve in 2013, a position I held until 2015. 

I lost my virginity, developed various unhealthy habits and eventually fell in love, got married and had two children, both boys. I was a panelist on a poorly rated increasingly reputable movie review panel show in the mid oughts and eventually left the world of salaried employment behind to try my lack as an independent with Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place and its publishing arm, Declan Haven Books. 

With one VERY notable exception, Conan O’Brien has been on late night television all that time making people laugh in a variety of high-profile gigs despite having a comic sensibility seemingly better suited to the writer’s room at The Simpsons, where O’Brien wrote some of the very best episodes of the greatest show of all time in its God-like prime, than average Joes and Normal Nancies in middle America. 

O’Brien has always been my guy. As much as I love and admire David Letterman, O’Brien’s gleefully absurd style of comedy always spoke to me more than Letterman’s sour neuroses, perhaps because I’m neurotic and depressive myself and have historically needed someone to lift me out of my gloom through the life-affirming powers of pure silliness like O’Brien rather than someone whose work serves as a perpetual reminder that the universe is fundamentally cold and meaningless. 

There are many differences between David Letterman and Conan O’Brien but for me the most important is that making people laugh seems to make O’Brien deliriously happy whereas making the walls of his studio reverberate with raucous laughter seemed to fill Letterman with misery and despair. 

As a lifelong depressive I understand the intense lack of pleasure  Letterman takes in his extraordinary gifts, the way he seems to instantly lose respect for his audience if they enjoy him too much but O’Brien has always been more my thing. 

For decades O’Brien has been comedy comfort food for me. Year in and year out, Conan O’Brien has been there for me. Seeing him live in Chicago is one of the great highlights of my time at the Onion, as was the time I got to interview him. 

I would go long stretches where I neglected to check in with Conan, but when I got back to watching the show felt like a big, welcoming hug from an old friend.  

I will concede, however, that I stopped watching when COVID hit because watching Conan do the show pretty much just by himself, at home, served as a constant reminder me that the world had changed dramatically and not for the better. 

I watch Conan partially for the cozy sense of continuity and tradition doing so provides so I did not take well to such a dramatic change. 

So you can imagine all of the intense, complicated feelings that came with learning that after decades in late night, O’Brien would be leaving Conan, his late night show on TBS, to host a weekly variety show for HBO MAX and focus on his extremely successful podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. 

It was one more instance of losing something that I grew up loving, something that gave me joy and escape and transcendence in a world that was often grim and gray. 

At the same time I am grateful that Conan was on late night for as long as he was, and that he got his own late night talk show at all given his background as a writer’s writer instead of a slick comedian. 

In that respect Conan’s whole career has been a miracle, a Cinderella story, a glorious aberration. 

I honestly don’t really know what to do with HBO Max but I’ll watch it for Conan. I owe him at least that much for all of the joy he has given me over the years. 

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Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang! 

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