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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."
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