From A Brilliant Uncool Geek
From the moment Conan O'Brien walks onto the set of his late-night talk show, it's clear he's a geek. Never mind the imposing figure and expensively cut suit; this guy is emphatically uncool. He is 6 feet 4 inches and does two-footed pirouettes in shiny black shoes. He jumps in the air with legs folded and lands in a knees-tight-together squat, like a guy who's studied a few too many KISS videos. He pauses dramatically to smooth out his eyebrows. And he's no less goofy when he settles into his seat."When I'm doing interviews, I get up on the desk," O'Brien says. "I growl. I hiss. I spin around in my chair. I'm not saying any of this is good; it's just what it is. And it's the kind of thing I was doing when I was eight years old -- refined and refined and refined." He pauses a beat. "If you could call it refined."
Whatever it's called, it's working. Plucked out of near-total obscurity in 1993 to take over NBC's Late Night franchise when David Letterman moved to CBS, O'Brien and his blend of skits, improv, jokes and chat now attract some 2.5 million nightly viewers in more than 40 countries (including Finland; more about that later). That number will surely swell in 2009, when O'Brien replaces Jay Leno as host of The Tonight Show and a wider audience learns what his fans already know -- that this uncool geek is a brilliant uncool geek. He can plumb the depths of puerile humor and pull out a gag that, adolescent at heart, is burnished by a keen, slightly twisted intelligence, making it much funnier than it has any right to be. O'Brien's genius lies in the insulating layer between the joke itself and his obvious awareness of just how silly -- or plain bad -- it is. The funny business all began at the family dinner table.
"We'd all see who could make our parents laugh the hardest," recalls O'Brien, 43, who grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, one of six children. His father was a doctor; his mother, a lawyer. "When I'd get going, I could get pretty far out there."
It probably helped that one of his favorite childhood pastimes was watching Marx Brothers movies, Sid Caesar and Johnny Carson with his dad. Yankee Doodle Dandy, the 1942 film starring James Cagney, set O'Brien on the show biz path. "Cagney was a tap dancer, and I thought, Well, you need to know that," he says. He took tap classes for a few years until a growth spurt killed his enthusiasm. He gave up the shoes, but not his wit. When he arrived at Harvard, O'Brien quickly landed a spot on the Harvard Lampoon -- a breeding ground for generations of comedy writers. It was there, he explains, that he learned "comedy could be taken seriously."
Fame and Family
He went on to study with the Groundlings improvisational comedy troupe in Los Angeles, then to writing gigs on The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. But he was still searching for his niche. "I'd watch David Letterman and think, I'd like to do what he's doing; there are some skits, you get to improvise with guests, tell some jokes," O'Brien says. "But I'd do it differently. My show would have puppets and robots, and I'd be singing and dancing."It was legendary SNL creator Lorne Michaels who recommended him as Letterman's replacement. Early reviews for Late Night With Conan O'Brien were scathing; ratings were low. NBC canceled the show, but with no ready replacement, O'Brien and company were allowed to limp along. Eventually, they found their rhythm -- and audience. These days, guests range from pop-culture icons (Bruce Springsteen, U2) to unlikely visitors, such as Tarja Halonen, the president of Finland. O'Brien's uncanny resemblance to her -- starting with his Irish setter mop -- is a running Late Night joke and prompted the show to travel to Finland, where O'Brien was greeted like a rock star and had a sit-down with Halonen.
Beyond the Halonen bit, O'Brien acknowledges that his hair is among his chief attributes. "It's pretty much taken over the show," he says. "It has separate representation. It has better publicity than I do."
For years, packed schedules and career demands had O'Brien convinced he didn't have time for a family.
"Being a performer is narcissistic," he says. "Being a performer with your own television show with your name in the title and your own theme song is the height of narcissism. I worried, I pour everything I have into this show -- how could I have a family? But then I thought, Test pilots have families. Heart surgeons have families. Nuclear physicists and Presidents of the United States have families. Get over yourself."
He met his wife, Liza Powel, a former advertising executive, while filming a sketch for Late Night on location in 2000. The couple have a daughter, Neve, who is two, and a son, Beckett, who will turn one soon.
"My son laughs at me, but he'd also laugh at a radiator," O'Brien says. "The other day I was making faces at my daughter and she said, 'Daddy, don't be silly. This isn't work!' She doesn't realize that I can't help it. My wife says, 'God help us the day you don't have a TV show.' "
With The Tonight Show and its bigger spotlight looming, she needn't worry for the foreseeable future. Those who enjoy his manic, brainy comedy needn't worry either.