O'Brien: Up close and personal

Before going on stage at Penn Monday, Conan O'Brien talked about his show and his future. Five times a week, late-night talk show host Conan O'Brien speaks to millions of Americans through his popular television program, Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Monday night, O'Brien entertained a sold-out crowd of 900 students in the Annenberg Center's Zellerbach Auditorium. Using humor, video clips and personal recollections, O'Brien provided his audience with a guided tour of his career, from his rocky start to his current success. Shortly before beginning his speech, O'Brien, 34, sat down with the The Daily Pennsylvanian for a 25-minute interview in Annenberg's Green Room. A 1985 graduate of Harvard University -- where he was the first student in 75 years to serve two terms as president of the famed Harvard Lampoon humor magazine -- O'Brien won an Emmy Award writing for NBC's Saturday Night Live and served as a writer and producer for Fox's The Simpsons before replacing David Letterman as host of Late Night. Always a comedian, O'Brien spoke to the DP about life in the Ivy League, his future in comedy, the secret life of sidekick Andy Richter and the experience of having kittens nurse at his bare nipples. College life DP: How is it being back at an Ivy League school? O'Brien: Well, I've been here for about eight minutes. All right, I'll say this: You guys have a much better auditorium than Harvard. It kicks Harvard's ass. DP: What was it like being a student at Harvard in the 1980s? O'Brien: A-ha was the big group. Remember them?? Accutane [a drug for severe acne] had not been invented yet, which destroyed my life. I wasn't the most attractive person in college. I certainly look better now than I did then, and if anything, I wish I could go back to college now and start dating. It would be a much more fulfilling experience. DP: What did you think of Penn while you were a student at one of our rival institutions? O'Brien: The problem with Harvard is that when people find out you went to Harvard, they automatically assume you are an asshole. Same with Yale. At Brown, they assume you wanted the pass-fail curriculum. Penn is one of the Ivy League schools -- it's kind of like only Penn and Princeton -- where they're not sure. There's kind of a mystique. DP: You were a history major at Harvard, correct? O'Brien: History and literature, it was a combined major. Yes, a combined major. I'm sorry, did that frighten you? History and literature of America is what I studied. It was an honors major. And I wrote a thesis -- would you like to know what it was titled? It was "Literary Progeria in the Works of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner." It was, like, 75 pages, I babbled and I somehow got an A. It's still on file somewhere at Harvard. Alternate career plans? DP: What would you have done if not comedy? O'Brien: Well, it's hard to say, I used to toy with the idea of being in politics. That idea used to kind of intrigue me. I like the idea of being out in front of crowds. I always wanted to do any job where you're out in front of crowds -- you're out in front of people. I was kind of intrigued with the idea of politics, and then it seemed dreadfully dull. Comedy seemed like the one thing where you get out in front of crowds but still is constantly changing. It's fun. DP: Do you have any political aspirations now? O'Brien: Yes, I'd like to emulate [former President Ronald] Reagan's career in that I'd like to lose my mind. What I'd really like to do is keep doing what I'm doing as long as possible. I could never run for political office. My opponents' campaign commercials would be ready-made: "Look, Conan's running for Congress."? And they would show this montage of me in a diaper, and dancing with Andy, and me licking my ass and me falling naked through space and landing on Fran Drescher. Just every humiliating thing I've ever done on television -- we actually did a bit once where kittens nursed at my naked nipples and I made an "ooh" face. And so, they would just show that and I would be through. 'Late Night': Before and after DP: You've been signed by NBC through 2002. Any thoughts on where the show is going? O'Brien: I would like it to become a game show as quickly as possible. I really would, because right now it's comedy and it seems to be working fairly well, but Andy has a very natural kind of game show pose. We try really hard to make the show as funny as possible. We stay up all night trying to make people happy. But then I look at Bob Barker on The Price is Right and he gives people stuff and they're thrilled -- they're out-of-their-minds excited. And I thought, "That's the way." Is Bob Barker up all night? Is he worried? He's not worried -- he sleeps very well. DP: You also made a name for yourself working on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons. How is the creative process different now that you have your own show? O'Brien: Saturday Night Live is closer to what I do now because there is a lot of kinetic energy and there are a lot of people running around. The Simpsons is a very pure writing lab. It's a room not unlike this [with] couches. From a writing point of view, it was very much like being in a Lawrence Livermore lab of comedy. A lot of very good work was done, but I always need to be around people. [The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a government science-and-technology lab in California.] DP: How long do you see your show running? Do you expect a three-decade run like Johnny Carson? O'Brien: I doubt it, no. Carson was on the air for years before anyone could mount a really good challenge. Now there's cable and there's all these different kinds of shows. And literally we're going to get the point where everyone in this room has their own show and we're going to be competing against each other. The sidekick DP: What is Andy Richter like in real life? O'Brien: Andy would shock you. He's not quite what you think he is from TV. He's not a frat guy. He probably would not want to join a frat and probably would not be allowed to join a frat. He's more of a "put-on-a-red-silk-smoking-jacket-and-make-himself-a-really-weird-martini-no-one's-ever-heard-of" kind of guy. That's the real Andy Richter. He's very well-read, and when some guys go "Hey Andy, let's throw back some beers," they don't [understand], no, that's not him. DP: There have been rumors every so often that Andy would leave the show. O'Brien: Andy's leaving the show? That's very upsetting. I don't pay him enough for him to be able to leave just yet. Someday he probably would, or maybe we'd decide to stop doing it or something. That's going to happen at some point -- it's inevitable. I mean, he could. He's a guy who likes a life of leisure. He could be one of those people who retires when he's, like, 38. His audience DP: Almost 900 tickets for your show sold out in about an hour's time. How would you explain your popularity among college students? O'Brien: My people got on the phone and ordered 400 tickets and desperately gave them away. One thing that I've always been grateful for is this show did not have an easy time in the beginning and the mainstream press was savage. People were really mean about me and they were even meaner about Andy. We just kept doing our show and doing things like "Conan Babies" and the "Lips" and totally different stuff -- like "In the Year 2000" -- things that didn't look right, they actually looked a little unprofessional. But we got through a whole season of two-thirds-full audiences, you know, "Don't shoot the back." College kids, younger people, don't like to be told what to like and what not to like. Everyone said, "Letterman's a genius, he's leaving NBC, NBC [is] stupid, Letterman's a god, whatever they find is going to suck." I'll be the first to admit the show was not nearly as good as it is now in the beginning. It wasn't as smooth, it wasn't as organic, because a good TV show is an organic thing. A good TV show is something that has some kind of a life to it. And it changes and grows. People got to know me, they got to know Andy, they got to know Max even. And they got to know our sketches, they start to know who we are and they understand where I'm coming from. We were always honest about our shortcomings -- we never pretended. Younger people are more accepting of that. And they also like to find their own thing. And that's the way it should be. The speech DP: The last major speakers Connaissance organized in Zellerbach Auditorium were James Earl Jones and Hillary Clinton. Do you think that you're in good company? O'Brien: I was supposed to be the voice of CNN, but they decided that a high, effeminate voice was not the way to go. Maybe a low, masculine voice. So, I think they blew it, because I think [in a falsetto voice] "This is CNN" would have been great. What did Hillary Rodham Clinton talk about? So, I'll probably get more laughs? It's going to be close. You let me know when I've officially passed her in number of laughs. Closing thoughts O'Brien: I'm glad we talked. I have all of these racial theories, but I'm told I'm not allowed to talk about them. What about that thing about Israel, no? I'm always doing that on the feed. We shoot our rehearsal and it goes all over the building, and people see it everywhere. People see it in the executive offices. So rehearsal is really fun because there's nothing [Richter and I] won't do or say. We just started fucking around in rehearsal. "You know, I have these racial theories, but you know what, I think medically they can be proven." We're just waiting for the phone to ring.

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