[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
THOMAS MCNAUGHT: So good evening.
I'm Tom McNaught.
I'm the Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation,
and on behalf of Tom Putnam, who is the Director of the John F.
Kennedy Presidential Library Museum,
we would like to welcome all of you to this wonderful forum.
It is my great pleasure to welcome you
to this special Kennedy Library forum,
with the legendary, the awesome Conan O'Brien.
Or as he is best known by his 5.7 million Twitter followers,
the Voice of the People.
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
Now, there are many similarities between Conan O'Brien
and President Kennedy.
Both grew up in large Irish Catholic families
in Brookline, Massachusetts.
And both spent much of their use goofing off,
while somehow still managing to get into Harvard.
Not only did Conan manage to get into Harvard,
he graduated magna cum laude with a degree
in US history and literature, and at the same time,
he served as editor of the Harvard Lampoon
for two years in a row.
As great a comedic genius in his writing as he is in person,
Conan wrote for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons
before going on to host Late Night with Conan
O'Brien, The Tonight Show, and now Conan,
which you can follow weeknights at 11:00 PM on TBS.
[LAUGHTER]
[COUGHING]
"People asked me why I named the show--
people asked me why I named the show "Conan," he said.
"I did it so I'd be harder to replace."
[LAUGHTER]
We are so very proud that Conan O'Brien serves
as a member of the Kennedy Library Foundation's
board of directors, how that came to pass
was his friendship with Caroline Kennedy.
Caroline tells us that the more time
she spent with Conan, the more she came to appreciate not only
is keen sense of humor, but his deep interest
in history, and in particular, presidential history.
These interests ultimately convinced her
that Conan would accept her invitation
to join the board of directors.
She knew that anyone who has busts of Abraham Lincoln
and Teddy Roosevelt in his office,
a Dwight Eisenhower mug on his talk show desk,
and photographs of her father hanging
on the walls of his home, would be an easy sell.
Our moderator tonight is Wesley Morris,
a film critic at The Boston Globe,
and recipient of this year's prestigious Pulitzer
Prize for Criticism--
a body of work which--
[APPLAUSE]
His body of work was described by the Pulitzer judges
as "Smart, inventive film criticism,
distinguished by pinpoint prose, in an easy traverse
between the art house and big-screen box office."
End quote.
A graduate of Yale, Wesley went on
to write film reviews and essays for the San Francisco
Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle
before joining the staff of The Boston Globe in 2002.
We are absolutely delighted to have him with us this evening,
and, again, we congratulate him on his Pulitzer.
Before closing, I wanted to note that in addition
to serving on our board of directors,
Conan O'Brien serves as the honorary chair of the John F.
Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation's New Frontier
Network.
And the purpose of that network is
to bring together young leaders committed
to advancing President Kennedy's ideals
of civic engagement in public service to new generations.
I want to welcome the many members of the New Frontier
Network who are with us in the audience tonight,
and to share with you why we asked Conan for his help
in reaching out to your generation.
It is because he believes so strongly in your potential
to make this world a better place.
In his closing words at the final broadcast of the Tonight
Show with Conan O'Brien, Conan had
this message for his younger audience, quote, "And all I ask
is one thing," he said, "and this I'm
asking this particularly of young people that watch.
Please do not be cynical.
I hate cynicism.
For the record, it's my least favorite quality.
It doesn't lead anywhere.
Nobody in life gets exactly what they
thought they were going to get.
But if you work really hard, and you're kind,
amazing things will happen.
I'm telling you, amazing things will happen.
I'm telling you, it's just true."
Please join me in welcoming to the Kennedy Library, Wesley
Morris and Conan O'Brien.
[APPLAUSE]
WESLEY MORRIS: Hi.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Hey.
WESLEY MORRIS: How's it going?
CONAN O'BRIEN: It's great.
I want to thank you for stepping in and doing this.
This is amazing.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yes.
You're welcome.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I think this illustrates
everything that's wrong with our country right now.
The Pulitzer Prize winner is asking questions
of the idiot on television.
[LAUGHTER]
I think this should be the other way around,
but maybe I'll come back and I'll talk to you.
WESLEY MORRIS: No, I think what you'll
discover in the next 59 minutes is that I
have no idea what I'm doing.
[LAUGHTER]
No, I mean, one of the things I was interested in talking
to you about was your comic persona, which
is this self-deprecating way of going about being funny,
that actually kind of belies your ambition in some ways.
I mean, before you your career had gotten
started you actually were the valedictorian
in your high school, Brookline High School,
you were the editor of your high school paper, is that right?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
Let's just say, yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah?
Is that true?
CONAN O'BRIEN: I don't remember.
It was a long time ago.
WESLEY MORRIS: OK, so I believe the answer to that question--
CONAN O'BRIEN: It was the early 1940s.
There was a war on.
I don't remember.
[LAUGHTER]
It was a long time ago.
WESLEY MORRIS: Your parents are here.
Anything that that's not true, someone will--
CONAN O'BRIEN: I love this.
My parents are sitting in the front row judging me
as we speak.
[LAUGHTER]
Just shaking their heads.
WESLEY MORRIS: Is it true?
Did he edit the paper.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I think so.
My mother doesn't know.
There were six of us.
They're not sure which one I am.
[LAUGHTER]
It was a kind of chaotic It's-A-Wonderful-Life house,
with everyone running around, and so they don't remember.
They're a terrible authority on what I did when,
and who exactly I am.
[LAUGHTER]
But you know, I have a lot of people
ask me about the self-deprecating thing
over the years, and a lot of people say,
almost like it's an act.
And I say, no, my people come by this very honestly.
[LAUGHTER]
We really do.
It's not an act.
And I think your personality is formed at a very young age.
I mean, your core personality--
scientists will claim that it's by the age of two or three,
but easily by the time you're 15 years old,
you have established who you are,
or 90% of what your core personality is going to be
is all downloaded.
And I was not an impressive person at all.
If I am at all now, certainly 15 was not the time
to take the core sample.
[LAUGHTER]
I was a very skinny, gangly kid.
I had acne.
I had this giant mop of hair I still don't know to do with.
I had an odd name, which is my father's fault,
and I didn't know where I really fit into the scheme of things.
So being self-deprecating was a defense mechanism,
and I came by it honestly.
Then later on you achieve these things,
and you're still working--
to this day, I'm working from the personality
of a 15-year-old who's 6" 4' and 111 pounds,
and who can't seem to get eye contact with any woman
in the United States.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: I'll give you some-- just go like that.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Just go like that?
I've tried that.
I just crouched down.
It's not the same.
So it's tough.
I really believe that this part of my personality is very real,
and whatever happens to me in life is not going
to change it at this point.
WESLEY MORRIS: Well, I think that's the thing that people
respond to though, right?
I mean, that it seems genuine.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I thought was my good looks.
Wow.
That's an indication that that was wrong.
No, I think people--
a long time ago, when I first got the late night job,
and this is hard to believe, it's almost 20 years ago,
but when I first got that late night show nobody knew
who I was, and everybody was saying, who is this guy?
And there were a lot of people, they were calling up
my friends, they were calling up roommates,
people who had known me.
I mean, they didn't really even have a picture of me,
the media.
They called my college roommate, Eric Reiff,
and they said, tell us about this guy.
Who is he?
And he said, the one thing I'll tell you
about him is that he doesn't like to be funny at people.
He likes to be funny with people.
He likes to join with them and make something funny happen.
And I think that's the core of what I do on my show,
and what I've like to do over time,
is just is make a funny situation happen
with somebody else.
And I don't know if that's coming
from the family I come from, or big family,
but I like to make things happen with people.
It's sort of a communal thing as opposed to--
I'm not comfortable sitting next to someone
and just shooting a laser beam at them of comedy,
and maybe making them the victim.
It makes me uncomfortable.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right, well, because then you
have to get out of that situation too.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Just go to commercial.
[LAUGHTER]
That's how all the other ones do it.
But yeah, there's always--
and it's not even really a moral choice.
It's what you-- everybody in this room
finds out at a certain point in their life
what they're good, at what they're not good at it.
You arrive at that, and it's kind of a mystical experience.
So I didn't choose--
there are people who are brilliant at dissecting
someone and taking them apart with their comedy.
I'm not very good at that.
That's not what I do.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I'd love to say it was a moral choice.
I don't even think it's a moral choice.
This is just what I do.
WESLEY MORRIS: But when did you figure that out though?
Well, first of all, I mean, I don't
know if everybody knows this, there's
some other impressive things about you
that seem to have nothing to do with your comedy.
Like the fact that you wrote your senior thesis on children
in Faulkner and O'Connor.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
It's a thesis that--
I worked really hard on this thesis.
It was a history and literature major,
and you need to write a thesis your senior year,
and it comes time and I wrote this thesis,
and it's the most pretentious title you've ever heard.
It's Literary Progeria in the Works of William Faulkner
and Flannery O'Connor.
And I wrote this thing that's like 90 pages long,
and it's about the prematurely aged child
in southern literature as a metaphor for the south, which
knew defeat in a country that had never known defeat.
Yeah, right.
[LAUGHTER]
People are filing out the back.
People are jumping into the ocean and swimming away.
WESLEY MORRIS: No, there was an agent
calling your phone right now.
That's a book!
CONAN O'BRIEN: That's a book!
That's a movie!
But I wrote this thesis, and then
flash forward to this tour I did two years ago,
and I'm living the rock and roll lifestyle.
We get all these great guest stars,
and I'm playing 5,000 seat houses,
and were sold out across the country,
and we're flying around or on a bus, and it's like a rock show.
And after the show, people would hold up
T-shirts to sign, and sign my arm,
and sign this, and sign that.
I'd come off the show and someone said,
I've got your thesis!
[LAUGHTER]
Sign your thesis!
And I just had this amazing flash
from working away on one of the earliest word processors
in 1984, which looked like a--
I mean kids today wouldn't believe it,
but it looked like--
it was like a phone booth.
And you had a keyboard attached to it, and you'd type away,
and you had to keep putting quarters in it.
It was in a room at Mather House.
This is all true.
And an alarm would go off, so you'd
be starting to get an idea and you'd hear [BEEPING]..
You'd put more quarters in.
And I wrote this thesis--
and the idea of that misery, and then knowing that sometime
later an 18-year-old girl would be handing me my thesis after
a rock show was--
well, she was older than that.
[LAUGHTER]
19, easy.
But, yeah.
I don't know how I got started on that.
You brought it up.
WESLEY MORRIS: I brought up the thesis.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I had a flashback, yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: I mean, it's a great idea.
And I think that--
what we were talking about-- you get this idea that you are not
as smart as you--
the thing is that you don't seem as smart as people--
as you actually are.
[LAUGHTER]
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
But that's your thing, right?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Has anyone ever mean walked out of one of these
before?
No, I know--
WESLEY MORRIS: You might be the first.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I know exactly--
Yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: I mean--
CONAN O'BRIEN: I know exactly what you're talking about.
WESLEY MORRIS: You make people--
you make it easier for people to be around you by underplaying
all your virtues and strong characteristics.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Well, also, the other thing is,
I really do honestly, the more-- as anybody knows--
the more you learn, the more you realize what you don't know.
So when I first moved out to Los Angeles.
I started teaching myself the guitar.
I went and bought the Mel Bay chord book and a $90 guitar,
and started sitting in my boxer shorts
in my $380 month apartment after work,
and teaching myself the guitar, and living off
ramen noodles and tuna fish.
And I remember thinking, all I want
to do is know three chords.
What happens is, once you start to get to a level
that you never thought you'd reach before,
all you know is how terrible you are,
because you just keep getting exposed to new levels.
And I really do have that feeling constantly of--
I'll think I'll have a funny show,
I think I've done something funny,
and then I'll see one of Woody Allen's best movies,
or something Bob Hope did in the 1950s,
or I'll read something that James Thurber wrote.
I mean, just constantly be reminded
that I don't know anything, and then
you just go back to square one.
And the more you think you know about history,
the more you realize, I really don't know anything yet
about history.
So there's a constant process, and it's just probably
my personality, but I like to be humbled.
I like to realize I am never that far from the kid
from Brooklyn High School who felt very insecure about going
to Harvard.
When I went to Harvard, and I met
people who had gone to Exeter, and Andover,
and they'd taken Latin.
I hadn't taken Latin.
There wasn't Latin in my high school.
I was very intimidated.
And it's that process over and over again,
and I think that just keeps happening throughout life.
You think you've got it figured out, and then you have kids,
and then you're presented again with you know nothing.
You know nothing, and you have a lot to learn,
and they look at you like you're an idiot.
And half the time they've just watched
you do something really stupid.
So that's a humbling experience.
So I like that.
I like to constantly be brought back down again.
WESLEY MORRIS: And we get that.
I mean, I think that that's--
I mean, that's all I was really saying
before is part of your brilliance
as a comedian is to underplay your brilliance.
You know what I mean?
You're may not be consciously doing it,
but you wouldn't have gotten this far if there weren't--
CONAN O'BRIEN: Well, you know what it is?
Everybody has-- in every famous person
that you're ever going to meet or see, all they've done
is hyper-refined the defense mechanisms
that they used when they were on the playground,
and they wanted to use the parallel bars,
and someone hit them in the face.
[LAUGHTER]
My experience was you go through a checklist when you're young--
and I don't know how many young people we have here--
but you go through a checklist of, what am I not good at?
And that fills up really quickly.
I mean, that was for me.
Very quickly it gets sorted out.
Let's play ball for the first time with other kids.
I'm not good at that.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Let's go talk to the pretty girl.
That didn't work.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's just a constant list.
And I went down the list, and it just
kept going and going and going.
And then I found out, you know what?
I can kind of just diffuse that situation by being funny.
WESLEY MORRIS: Mm-hmm.
CONAN O'BRIEN: And he was about to strike me in the face--
this is my dad we're talking about.
[LAUGHTER]
Come on.
He loves it, and it's true.
[LAUGHTER]
This is this morning I'm talking about.
[LAUGHTER]
But you're working your way down the list,
and I diffused the situation, and I
remembered the nickel drops.
And everybody in this room had that situation,
whether it's humor, or being an athlete,
or you're a good cook, whatever.
You figure out what it is, and when you're a kid, you--
man, I've got that.
And I kept looking for other things
and they weren't showing up.
So I kept-- I'll work on that some more,
and I'll work on that some more.
And that leads to a TV show and mental illness.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: But I mean, what was
the moment when you realized that that
was what was going on with you?
CONAN O'BRIEN: I realized that I knew that I had
something I really liked to do.
I liked to perform.
I did that.
And then at some point, like in fifth grade,
I remember, or fourth grade, I used
to be in plays all the time, and I used to write things.
And I thought, this is something I'd like to do,
and I was fascinated.
For some reason, I had a out of time fascination
with movies from the '30s and '40s,
because they were shown a lot here
in Boston, on the UHF stations.
I don't know if anyone will remember,
but in the days before cable there
was there was the ABC affiliate, the NBC affiliate, the CBS
affiliate, and then channel 56, and channel 38.
And they would show old movies.
That's all they would show.
And I used to watch those, and it
was lost on me that these were made 50 years ago.
And so, I would watch these movies
like Yankee Doodle Dandy where Jimmy Cagney is
talking real fast, and he's dancing, and he's singing.
And I would say, that's what you need
to know to be an entertainer.
Of course, it's the 1970s.
[LAUGHTER]
Like an idiot, I don't understand there's
been a huge cultural movement.
And I go to my parents, and I said--
I'm even talking like Jimmy K, and I'm like, now,
see here you!
[LAUGHTER]
And I said, I need to learn how to be a tap dancer.
My parents were like, what are you talking about?
And I said, I want to be in show business someday,
and this kid's got to know how to tap his toes, you see?
[LAUGHTER]
And they were like, well, are you smoking?
[LAUGHTER]
Why are you in black and white?
We'll get to that later!
You shut your yap, see?
I got to learn how to dance!
So they went and they got me a tap dancing teacher,
God bless them.
They went and they called all around,
and they found this guy Stanley Brown,
who had been the protégé of Bill Bojangles Robinson.
And this is all completely true.
[LAUGHTER]
And I went, and he's this older African-American gentleman,
who was a great tap dancer, and he
lived in a dilapidated studio.
Everyone there was a jazz dancer, and everyone was black,
and then this white kid with orange hair
would show up with tap shoes under his arm.
It's like, hey, you!
WESLEY MORRIS: How tall were you?
CONAN O'BRIEN: I grew.
I was short, and then I grew overnight, like the Hulk.
I grew like three feet in one year.
And you could hear it.
My parents could hear bone knitting up in the attic.
WESLEY MORRIS: But when you were taking this tap class,
you were just a little guy.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I was still small, and I was learning tap,
and I thought, this is what I need to know.
Then a few years later, I thought, I'm in Boston.
And at the time, show business could not
have felt further away.
The only experience any of us had
had with any kind of celebrity was Robert Urich
was in Spencer for Hire, and they shot a few exteriors
around here.
And that was my experience with show business
is that I knew someone, who knew someone, who saw Robert
Urich in Filene's Basement.
[LAUGHTER]
So I remember thinking, this isn't going to happen.
And my dad, he's a scientist, and my mom's a lawyer,
and forget it.
So I buckled down to be a really hardcore student,
and really worked hard, and was very serious,
and then got into Harvard thinking
I'm going to be a serious writer of letters,
and I'm going to do great things!
And within days of getting to Harvard,
my roommate John O'Connor said, I'm
going to the Harvard Lampoon to check it out.
I didn't really know much about the Harvard Lampoon,
but I went along, and the rest of it just happened.
And then the next thing you know,
I was blown away that people valued humor as something other
than just, this is what you do for your friends
to make them laugh.
And then I started to hear tell that you could go places,
and they would maybe pay you if you did this.
And you'd think, is that possible?
I mean, that sounded crazy.
And I ended up going out to Los Angeles, and lots of twists,
and turns, and ups and downs.
So there was never a conscious decision for a long time,
to get into this business, I think until the Lampoon.
And then, I started to feel like, this is interesting.
This seems to have some merit beyond getting people
not to hit me.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right, right.
Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: So that changed everything.
WESLEY MORRIS: No, it's interesting.
I think a lot of people who figure out
what they want to do figure it out by accident.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Mm-hmm.
WESLEY MORRIS: And it's sort of reverse ambition.
I think a lot of it is luck.
So if you're in the right place at the right time,
or you think you might like something, so you tried it
and it sticks.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: But at various points, I'm sure that you--
once you were in Los Angeles, I mean, it sounds at some point
that you became a comedy student in some way.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yes, yeah.
Well, I'd always paid attention.
My dad has always been interested in comedy,
and had always been interested in why did this work?
And why did that not work?
And still loves to call me occasionally and explain to me
why something I did on television
didn't work or did work.
[LAUGHTER]
No, but he had an ear for it, an eye for it,
and I adopted the same thing, which is we just both love
to watch Johnny Carson.
A lot of people in my family loved to watch him,
and my dad loved late night television, and the Peter
Sellers Pink Panther movies.
And so wildly different stuff--
the movie Sleeper, Woody Allen.
And we would all appreciate the same moments.
So you don't even realize you're a student of these things.
Your passion takes you this way.
If there's one theme you could maybe take away from tonight,
is I think, very little of this is decision.
I think a lot of it is passion, and you
have very little control over that as an individual.
You just find yourself being drawn certain ways,
and you keep refining that and working at it.
And I've always said, I'm very unimpressed by talent.
And by that I mean, I have many people over the years
say, my kid's going to be great!
He's got a lot of talent!
And I think, I do nothing but meet people
with lots of talent.
It's what you do with it.
There's a lot of talent out there.
There's a lot of talent in Los Angeles and New York.
There's a lot of talent throughout the country.
And you can see this all the time
and in sports, people have incredible amount of talent.
How many times have you heard the story
that the person with the most natural talent disappears?
And it was the person who was largely ignored--
Hard work, there is no substitute for it.
And that's the thing I'm always telling young people
and interns that work on the show, that that's the bad news,
is that they've found no substitute for working really
hard.
I worked my ass off when I was a kid, and in my 20s, and 30s,
and I still work really hard.
And I think there is no substitute for it,
and I think that is the good news and the bad news.
I mean, I have no idea if they someday
invent a talent meter that tells you how much natural talent
you were born with.
I'd be afraid to go near it, because I don't know.
It might say, not that much.
But you worked your ass off and you compensated this much.
Or you had some, but, man, did you maximize it!
And I think that was my obsession, was whatever I have,
I want to max it out.
I want to see what I can do with this.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: And that's probably
what made the biggest difference.
WESLEY MORRIS: So we should say that this is a conversation
with Conan O'Brien.
I'm Wesley Morris from The Boston Globe,
and we're talking.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh, that was for the-- was that for the radio?
WESLEY MORRIS: That's for the radio.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh, I thought you just
had a seizure of some kind.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: I warned you about this!
CONAN O'BRIEN: I thought your doctor told you,
once in a while tell yourself who you are and where you are.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah.
CONAN O'BRIEN: And proceed.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yes.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I'm Conan O'Brien.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah, a Pulitzer Prize fell on my head.
I forgot who I was.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Exactly.
That scared me.
[LAUGHTER]
But I'm OK now.
WESLEY MORRIS: I was, like a lot of people, a couple of years
ago, when that whole Jay Leno thing happened,
I was sort of struck by--
and this, it's in line with what we have been talking about,
which is what makes you so likeable and so
relatable in a lot of ways.
And a lot of it has to do with this defense mechanism you
developed, a comedy style.
But when that whole thing went down,
and I think the version that we got anyway,
very much made people able to relate
to your side of the story, and made it really difficult
to have any sympathy for Jay Leno.
And that, I don't think had anything
to do with either one of you, I think
that just became how the media-- well, I mean,
you might beg to differ.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: What-- what's your--
say it.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I remain silent.
WESLEY MORRIS: OK.
But it was just interesting that the nation had chosen sides,
I think.
And you seemed much more sympathetic, both
because I think of who we imagine you to be, as a person,
and also I think we really were able to relate to what we
thought was you having something promised to you, given to you,
and then rescinded.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Right.
WESLEY MORRIS: And I was just curious
if there was anything about yourself
during that entire fiasco that you learned that surprised you?
CONAN O'BRIEN: I think the biggest surprise
in that whole thing, or the best thing
that I was able to take away from that was I
come from people pleasers.
We aim to please, we O'Briens.
We are nice people, where we tend
to try and make everyone around us happy.
And especially in a work environment,
we're very deferential.
We just want to work harder than we are
expected to work, and get less.
We're comfortable in that role.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
[LAUGHTER]
CONAN O'BRIEN: It's true.
We don't want a lot of attention.
It's just the culture.
It might be a very Irish Catholic culture, I don't know.
But work this hard, don't stick your head out too much,
do a really good job, make people happy.
And I think I had always been that way
throughout my entire career.
And I think what was interesting about that moment was it was
the first time in my entire career where I was being told
we need you to go-- and that in that situation--
we need you to slide over and move the show--
move The Tonight Show into the next day.
And I think because they knew me so well, they just said, look,
he's done everything else, he's going to do this.
And I didn't.
And that was almost a surprise to me, as well.
But I just decided, I don't know what's going to happen.
I may be completely through in television,
but I can't do this.
This doesn't feel right, and so, I'm not going to do it.
And that was, I think, the healthiest--
whatever-- personal moment that I took from it.
And I think, in terms of other people responding to anything,
it was always really important to me,
and it's still important to me, that people
understand that I did not feel entitled to anything.
I don't believe in that.
I really don't believe in, I was promised The Tonight Show,
and so I get to, it's my right to.
There was a bunch of circumstances behind the scenes
that made that not work out in that situation,
and I wasn't happy about it, and it was a major disappointment.
But we live in a culture of entitlement a lot of times,
where people--
how dare you?
This is my right!
And I've always been very clear about saying,
it's nobody's right to host The Tonight Show.
It's absurd.
That was an opportunity.
It didn't work out for a million different reasons.
Some known, some unknown.
What the hell?
Life is short.
A lot of people have a lot of problems.
Keep moving.
And I think that may have been the tone
that a bunch of people responded to,
was just this feeling of don't pity me.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
Well, you also didn't--
There were two things that came out of it, the first of which
was your explanation, which was really about The Tonight Show
legacy, right?
It wasn't framed as you being a great person,
it was there's this show that I loved as a kid.
I've always wanted to host it.
I got to host it, but you guys want
to move it to 12:05, which is no longer tonight, it's tomorrow.
Then it's Matt Lauer and Ann Curry, but really early,
which would make Carson Daly.
I don't know.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Right.
WESLEY MORRIS: It's not the thing that you wanted to do.
And so, it really ultimately became
about into the institution of The Tonight Show, which
was also charming, and it's a really good case
to be made for that.
And then there's the embargo which happened,
and that was the thing that you meant
to turn into great comedy, which was the thing where
you couldn't be on television.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Right.
For a period of time, yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: Which made people mad and sympathetic to you.
Can you talk about the process to exploit that?
CONAN O'BRIEN: It was, again, it's all the best
things are accidents.
We finished the last Tonight Show,
and at the spur of the moment we ended up doing a live jam.
I said those final words, and then I
went over to the performance area
and I jammed with Will Ferrell, his very pregnant wife, who
gave birth a few hours later.
[LAUGHTER]
And then these amazing guitarists, Beck, we
had ZZ Top, and it was this fantastic jam band.
And we sang Freebird, and it was just this very silly, jubilant
Viking funeral for the show, which felt like it's my tone,
it's silly, it's up note, it's not a down note.
And it's saying, this is absurd and funny,
and we get a minute left of this Tonight Show,
let's really have fun with it.
So we that.
It was over.
I love playing music, and I knew that I my producer
was standing off to the side.
And I said, now, I'm not allowed to perform comedy
on television, or the radio, I'm not
allowed to do this or do that, am I allowed to perform live?
And he said, yeah, I think so.
And I said, I think all I want to do
is just put on a fake mustache and play
in different rockabilly bands in nightclubs
for a couple of months, just as a weird Andy Kaufman
thing that I would do.
And so, he said, sure, whatever.
That's pathetic.
[LAUGHTER]
But I thought, that's what I want to do.
And then what happened is, he mentioned it
to my agent, who happened to work at Endeavor, which
just happened to merge with a company that
did live performances.
And someone punched into a computer and said,
if you went out on the road, you should bring a real band
with you, and you could sell out across the country.
And we thought, that's kind of interesting,
like this performance art to just go across the country.
And my whole career has been, to take you
back to that kid who's trying to tap dance in 1978,
I've always been out of time.
I've always been trying to get back to Vaudeville.
I've always wanted to be a vaudevillian,
and so, this is my chance to actually tour
vaudeville theaters across the country,
and do song, and dance, and comedy review.
And so, I did it, and there was a whole grassroots movement
behind it.
And we thought, we have to keep this pure.
And we had some offers from big corporations.
We'll help underwrite this, but you
have to let us have corporate ticket sales for day first.
And we said, we can't do it.
Can we just have the money?
[LAUGHTER]
Turns out that's not the way it works.
But we ended up--
American Express ended up saying, we get it.
That's cool.
Well, all right.
We just want to help.
And it was great.
And that was one of the best--
that might be the single best, most interesting, fascinating
time of my life creatively, and it was all an accident.
It was just one thing following another,
and the next thing you know, I'm playing
with Eddie Vedder in front of 5,000 people,
and thinking, how did any of this happen?
He's from Pearl Jam, people.
[LAUGHTER]
Sorry.
It just didn't go well.
I just looked out at a sea of, what
is this Vedder you speak of?
Tell us more.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: But did you feel free?
I mean, were you scared?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, I'm always scared.
I think it's good to be scared.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Unfortunately, that's
what I tell my child when she is crying at night.
[LAUGHTER]
It's good to be scared!
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: Can't we ...
that's gonna be a great memoir.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
They're already medicated.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, no.
I believe in being scared.
I think the minute-- especially if you're not--
whenever anybody-- I don't know if as a writer,
you run into people who tell you how much they love writing?
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh, I just love writing!
WESLEY MORRIS: I don't know who those people.
CONAN O'BRIEN: And I think, I don't
want to read what you write.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I have no interest.
It can't be good.
Whenever someone tells me that, just the act
of being out in front of people and performing is exhilarating,
the preparation and the before part is not,
and I think that should never change.
So I think it's good to be scared.
I think it's good to be doubting yourself.
I think it's good to constantly be holding things
up to the light and saying, is this any good?
Does this work?
And unfortunately, it's also good to fail,
which is very hard to explain in this culture to people.
[ONE PERSON APPLAUDS]
Wow.
[LAUGHTER]
You just exposed yourself.
This person over there in rags.
Finally!
Uh-oh!
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: No, but that actually is true.
So I wanted to--
initially, I wanted to start by talking about this,
because we're in the JFK Library, but I mean,
it's a good a time as any to talk about it now,
which is something that I had read
that you'd talked to my colleague Mark
Shanahan, maybe yesterday.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Mm-hmm.
WESLEY MORRIS: And one of the things
you discussed with him was this Irish pride
that you had growing up in the JFK era, or around that time.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Right.
WESLEY MORRIS: And in how that family--
how you lived in a household that
had the full Irish American experience.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: Your grandmother was not well to do.
She came over, and--
CONAN O'BRIEN: She actually had been born here,
but we I had said that a great experience for me
was my mother's mother lived with us for a period of time
after my grandfather passed away.
And she lived well into, I think, her late 90s.
So she had had really--
I think she'd been born in 1890.
And so, she had had the full experience
of witnessing firsthand discrimination
against Irish Catholics.
And when you think about someone who's born at that time,
you think about what that generation saw.
I mean, she's born in a world of ice wagons being
pulled by horses, and Irish Catholics being discriminated
against.
And she dies 20 some odd years after President Kennedy,
and there's a space shuttle, and that's an astounding lifetime,
to see all of that happen.
But it's very interesting too, when you read history
and you think about history, and I'm a real history buff,
I'm always struck by how things weren't that long ago.
Do you know what I mean?
WESLEY MORRIS: Mm-hmm.
CONAN O'BRIEN: And I think that because I
work with a lot of young people who
think that the Reagan administration was
50 years ago--
[LAUGHTER]
It may as well be to them.
Time has sped up so much in the digital age,
that things that happened 15 years ago
seem like 100 years ago.
I think that's a byproduct of the digital age we're in,
is people's attention spans are so short that suddenly it's
like, tell us more of this Jimmy Carter that you speak of.
And you're like, well, OK.
They don't know, which can be a little frightening at times.
But you look at the transformation
that happened in 1960, and what an issue John F. Kennedy's
Catholicism was when he's running for President.
Today, people just think that's absurd,
but I remembered my grandmother would be going off
to school, at the Michael Driscoll school,
and it's this incredibly liberal school
system, and one of the best school systems in the United
States.
Integrated, and they're constantly
hypersensitive to everyone's ethnicity and background,
and discussing it constantly, and are you comfortable?
And I'm headed off to school, and my grandmother
said to me, well, it's St. Patrick's Day, so be ready.
And I said, be ready for what?
She said, the Protestants are all
going to taunt you at school.
She said, they're going to put chalk in your milk.
[LAUGHTER]
Just then my African-American friend with a giant Afro
shows up.
It was a crazy experience.
That was her experience, was that on St. Patrick's Day
you could get teased.
I had friends that were from Iran during the Iranian hostage
crisis that went to our high school.
That's how diverse and integrated everything was.
But I didn't take it for granted,
because my grandmother gave me that experience.
She gave me that snapshot into things changed a lot.
I never took it for granted that this
was something that had always been this good for us.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right, right.
No I mean, and I read that, and I just
thought about my grandmother and the fact
that she still can't believe that there's
a Negro in the White House.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Right.
WESLEY MORRIS: She's still beside herself.
And I just found that very touching,
the idea that you grew up in this house where--
CONAN O'BRIEN: There are these transformative moments
in American politics, and we're in the midst of one.
I think that was a big moment that everyone
could relate to a few years ago, was Obama's election.
Now, the nice thing is the byproduct
of that, is going to be young people who don't
think that's such a big deal.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Everyone in this room
knows, no, that's a huge deal.
After everything this country's been through,
that is still a huge deal.
But the byproduct will probably be
people, in a good way, thinking that that is not
as momentous a change as it really was,
which is probably what we eventually need to get to.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah, no.
I mean, it's fascinating.
One of the other things that I wanted to talk about
was some of the guests you've had on your show.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Mm-hmm.
WESLEY MORRIS: And I think that my personal favorite guest,
mostly because you didn't know what
to think of her beyond what we were
supposed to think of her until she came to visit you--
it's Martha Stewart.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Right.
WESLEY MORRIS: You guys have--
I mean, you've got Andy and you and Andy have your thing.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Right.
WESLEY MORRIS: But I feel like you and Martha Stewart have--
I don't know what it is.
It's just really good comedy.
I don't know if you really love her and think she's great.
But the thing that--
CONAN O'BRIEN: We are lovers.
We are lovers.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: It didn't seem kinky to me.
CONAN O'BRIEN: No, it's very kinky and erotic.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: I'm going to have to eat later.
Tone it down.
CONAN O'BRIEN: She's a terrific--
it's the oldest rule in the book.
I do best with a authority figure who has some gravitas.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yes.
CONAN O'BRIEN: That's the best person to me to bounce off of.
I am the silliest.
And you think about it, who's better than Martha Stewart?
She is one of the biggest brands in the world.
She's efficient.
It's all about, this is how you do it.
You do it correctly.
You don't make a mistake.
This is how it's done, and it's perfect,
and on to the next thing.
And then you put her next to me, and I'm already an ass,
but around someone like that, I could
become much more of an ass.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah.
CONAN O'BRIEN: And suddenly, I'm going way out of my way
to ruin the chiffon cake we're making.
And she knows it's comedy, but she can't stand it.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: She just can't stand it.
CONAN O'BRIEN: So it's fantastic,
because she knows there are cameras,
and she knows there are people there,
and she knows it's Conan O'Brien.
And she's always saying, well, he's very funny,
and he's a little bit of a mad man,
so you'll have to excuse Conan.
But anyway, we're going to make the cake,
and then it's very important to put that right like that.
And I'll go, you mean like this?
And she'll be like, no!
[LAUGHTER]
No!
And she can't help it.
She just can't help it.
And it's so funny.
And then people laugh.
It's funny to see.
And it's just perfect when someone just reaches over
and ruins it.
WESLEY MORRIS: But the thing that's funny
is the thing that you're getting at before, which
is that it's not mean to her.
CONAN O'BRIEN: No.
WESLEY MORRIS: It's not mean spirited.
You're just being obnoxious, and you know--
[LAUGHTER]
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: You know, how long until Martha
detonates in this segment?
CONAN O'BRIEN: There was a segment
we did for the old Late Night Show,
where she's taking me through her place in Connecticut, which
is where she makes all the food.
WESLEY MORRIS: Turkey Hill.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, exactly.
You've never seen anything like it.
I mean, no offense mom, but it's an amazing kitchen.
[LAUGHTER]
And there's just-- everything is perfect.
And at one point, she's showing me all of these spoons
in a drawer, and they're all perfectly laid out.
And she said, it's important.
I have a system.
And I can feel my hands trembling.
I can't help it.
And she's like, these are the soup spoons, and they're "s,"
so they're here.
And these are the tea spoons, but it's a "t,"
so we put them here.
And that's number one, and number five goes here.
And I just reached over and I went--
[LAUGHTER]
And something inside her died.
It was absolutely fantastic.
And I know that then nine people came in and spent all night
putting it back, while Martha slept
in her hyperbaric chamber.
[LAUGHTER]
But yeah, I'm just always looking for people
that I bounce off of in that way.
And like I say, authority figures are fantastic.
I just love to--
and then I become more of a child for some reason.
WESLEY MORRIS: Is there somebody else that does that for you?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, I'm trying to think.
There are lots of people who do that.
I'm trying to think off the top my head.
There's a lot of, I sometimes think,
revered actors when they come on.
If someone's revered in certain ways,
that it can just be funny.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Because I don't have that belief.
I don't revere them as probably as much as I should.
I'm having trouble thinking--
I'll think of a name in a second.
WESLEY MORRIS: Well, I--
CONAN O'BRIEN: Pauly Shore.
[LAUGHTER]
From Biodome.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: Revered, yes.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Revered.
WESLEY MORRIS: Is there a difference
in being on TBS, versus being on NBC for you,
in terms of maybe how free you feel?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, definitely.
I think there is a--
WESLEY MORRIS: Because as a viewer, I notice a difference.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, definitely.
There was a lot transformative--
what I went through was transformative in a lot
of ways.
I think one of the other things was, it was a reality check on,
I'm just very grateful to have a television show.
And so, if you work in television for a long time,
especially in comedy, and you start
to get a lot of clicks on the odometer,
you can start to feel-- it sounds crazy--
but you can start to feel like, I've
got to go in and do that today.
And that just builds up over time.
Like gunk builds up in an engine,
if you're burning long enough, and fast enough,
and hard enough, you start to build up this--
it's almost very natural the build up a,
I've got to go do that!
And I think that starts to creep into your life a little bit.
And plus, over time, you can start
to feel like this institutional weight of things.
And I think going through everything
I went through just made me realize
I really love doing this, and now I'm getting to do it.
And I think there's a lot of joy.
That I get to come back to a place of I get to do this.
I'm really lucky to get to do it.
I don't know how much longer I get to do it,
but let's really have fun and try everything we can think of.
WESLEY MORRIS: Do you think it's all clicking now?
I mean, not that it wasn't previously.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, I think it just does
feel like we went from being--
when you're in a big network institutional system,
it can feel like the boat turns more slowly.
And we went to a little cigarette boat that
zips around, and pirouettes.
And I think with the social media everything we've done,
we're much more agile.
We're able to be much more agile than we used to be able to be.
I think we're able to respond more to the way the media
culture exists now.
And so, that's all very liberating.
It's really fun.
So I'm never someone who will tell you
it's all clicking, because I've always
have that, it could be better.
WESLEY MORRIS: Sure.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Just push and push,
and we're almost-- it's the thing that I'm always
repeating at my show is, we're getting there.
We're getting there.
And you know they all just laugh at me now,
because they know they'll come and visit me
in a home when I'm in my 90s, and I'll
be like, we're getting there!
They know that that's just my mantra,
is that we're getting there, but we're never there.
WESLEY MORRIS: Do you get to watch the other guys?
CONAN O'BRIEN: No, I don't find that helpful to me,
and it's also the last thing I want to do when I come home.
WESLEY MORRIS: Sure.
CONAN O'BRIEN: And as I mentioned, I am a history buff.
I know Robert Caro was just here.
This is how much of a geek I am, when I heard that Robert Caro's
book had been finished but not published yet,
I made all these backchannel calls.
Other people are trying to get to the Playboy Mansion,
I made all these calls to get an editor's draft of Robert Caro's
book.
And it came in this big tablet, and I read it under the covers
like it was porn.
WESLEY MORRIS: For some people it is porn.
CONAN O'BRIEN: It is.
It is for me.
And so, I love that.
And when I come home, I like to watch a Frontline piece,
or I like to watch a documentary.
I like to watch something that's the complete opposite of what
I do for a living.
That's what recharges my batteries,
is watching the Tsar's empire crumble in 1917.
And my wife, I always come home, and she says,
hey, I've got 30 Rock saved up.
Let's watch it.
It takes place in 30 Rockefeller Center about an NBC show.
And I'm like--
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: The PTSD kicks in.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, that's not how I
want to spend my time relaxing.
I want to see a World War II.
I mean, there are all these channels now
that feed my addiction.
I want to watch a long documentary
about Johnson or whoever.
I just want to learn more about American history.
That's my hobby.
WESLEY MORRIS: And I guess this is a fairly reductive question,
but I mean, do you wish that there
are ways that you could integrate
those two things more actively?
Or do you like keeping them discrete?
CONAN O'BRIEN: I like keeping them discreet.
Every now and then I get to do something interesting.
A few years ago, I was asked to speak alongside an academic
about Lincoln's humor.
I had done all this reading about Lincoln's speeches,
and trying to explain what it is that made Lincoln so funny.
And so, I agreed to do this event, and then they said, OK.
And I said, where are we going to perform?
They said, it's in Washington.
I said, that's great.
And then they told me it's at Ford's Theater.
[LAUGHTER]
I got creeped out, and then I thought,
I guess it's a theater.
So we did it there, and it actually
ended up being a great evening of just talking
about trying to bring his comedy to life,
bringing Lincoln's humor to life.
And what was it about his writing and a sense of humor
that I thought was actually kind of modernist, and of our time,
rather than of his time?
And so, we ended up talking about that,
and it was really fun.
And I got access to getting through the back door
of some museums, and looking some documents.
And I thought, OK, that's great!
Other than that, I like to leave it to the professionals.
I mean, there are people that--
I'm aware that I'm an amateur, and I like to read
and I like to read history--
but there are people that really know this stuff,
and they should be up talking to people.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: And every now and then it
just informs my comedy a little bit, but that's about it.
WESLEY MORRIS: Mm-hmm.
But I mean, one of the things, as a person who
watches something like movies, for instance, professionally,
and you get a lot of movies about history,
but you get very few movies now where the people making it
have some perspective on the history actually, that's funny.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Right.
WESLEY MORRIS: There are very few good satires.
There are very few good farces.
Those are all on TV now.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Right.
WESLEY MORRIS: And I feel like your sensibility might
lend itself--
CONAN O'BRIEN: Every now and then we do--
WESLEY MORRIS: -- with some structure.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, it finds its way into the show,
and we have certain obsessions, but for the most part,
I don't consciously try to do that.
It's something that's just my hobby more than anything else.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: If it ends up coming into the show,
it's usually an accident.
WESLEY MORRIS: So I think it's about question time.
So I'm going to read questions that you guys have
given to me or to the library for Conan.
There's a lot.
CONAN O'BRIEN: It says, who the hell do you think you are?
WESLEY MORRIS: Well, if that's one of the questions then--
CONAN O'BRIEN: Who do you think you are?
WESLEY MORRIS: Let's see.
I can't read that one, sorry.
OK, how about this one?
I grew up watching your show for years,
and love your sense of funny and comedic timing!
Exclamation point.
Have you ever considered doing a movie or a sitcom?
CONAN O'BRIEN: No.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't have the temperament for it.
I don't think anybody really wants to see it.
WESLEY MORRIS: I don't know if I agree with that, but go on.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Well, no.
Like movies.
Movies are-- I burn fast, and so, I'm
actually in the right medium for me,
which is we think of something at 3:00 o'clock
in the afternoon, we tape two hours later,
and then you see it at 11:00 o'clock at night.
That's my temperament.
I've watched people that go in, and they--
if anyone here watched a movie you get made,
it's just maddening.
And they sit there--
WESLEY MORRIS: OK, then you would die.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, I would just--
my soul would leave my body.
I also don't think that that is what I meant to do.
I don't think I would--
I think I've found the right format for me.
And me in a sitcom, where I share
an apartment with a chimp--
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: You are good with animals.
CONAN O'BRIEN: It's in development, yeah.
That will be on TV.
WESLEY MORRIS: You and Jack Hanna have a thing.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, we're good.
WESLEY MORRIS: OK, so, Conan, please
comment about President Kennedy's wit
and his ability to make people laugh.
Thank you.
CONAN O'BRIEN: That's very presumptuous, the thank you.
[LAUGHTER]
It will be done!
In advance, I thank you.
Now, do as I say!
[LAUGHTER]
I've been thinking about this a lot.
I really think that he is up there with Lincoln
as one of the funniest American presidents we've ever had.
WESLEY MORRIS: I think, by the way,
most people-- you're blowing some minds right now.
I don't-- Do we all know that Lincoln is funny?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, Lincoln's really funny.
Lincoln's-- we can't go into it now.
I'm doing something at the Lincoln Library next week.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't got a lot of time here.
I think Kennedy is truly one of the most naturally
funny presidents that we've had, and we have not had a lot.
It's not something-- we do not tend to elect funny people.
And I think now, we have a media savvy culture,
so presidents are getting better at coming across as funny
when they need to, but I don't think
it comes from a natural place.
And I think everything I know about John F. Kennedy is
that he was naturally quite funny throughout his life,
but he also experienced a lot of problems you know in his youth
with his health, and he had to develop--
talk about a defense mechanism--
I think he almost died many times
as a young man of different diseases
and different ailments, and he was very sick.
And that was something that he learned at a very young age.
I always thought that that probably
sharpened his sense of irony.
And he'd been in World War II.
He had experienced firsthand how screwed up things
can be in the military and in the Navy.
And I think he learned his ironic sense of humor.
It came by naturally, but he also
developed it through experiencing
a lot of these hardships.
And it made him see the world, I think in a very--
he had an ironic, amused, and some thought, almost detached
wit about how screwy the world can be,
which I think is invaluable as an American president.
I don't ever get the sense that he took himself that seriously,
in a good way.
He was immune to that a little bit,
in a way that I think some American presidents haven't
been.
He was able to be a little detached from that,
and see everything is as being somewhat humorous or twisted.
WESLEY MORRIS: Then there's the opposite, where everything
is funny with some presidents.
CONAN O'BRIEN: In what way?
WESLEY MORRIS: Well, I'm thinking of a specific person
who-- whatever.
We'll just move on to the next question,
because then it turns into a different conversation.
CONAN O'BRIEN: You mean unintentionally funny?
WESLEY MORRIS: Yes.
CONAN O'BRIEN: OK.
We'll leave it alone.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: So what are your views
on the intersection-- this is a related question-- what
are your views on the intersection of comedy
and politics?
Is the Daily Show good for the country?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh, it's great.
I think the Daily Show and Colbert,
I mean, those guys are extremely talented.
WESLEY MORRIS: You had a little mock thing with them.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I had a mock feud with them
during the writers' strike, where we all
ended up beating each other up.
They're extremely good and very good
for the country, because they're intelligent.
And whenever someone intelligent is doing comedy that's popular,
I believe that that's good for the country.
So I think-- and what Colbert is doing right now with the Super
PACs, I think, is brilliant.
He's such a fun person to watch.
The times I've gotten together with him,
he almost feels like, yeah, he could have been
another brother in my family.
He's very physically funny and silly,
and would have fit right in.
So yeah, I think it's very good for the country.
Everyone's got a different strength.
I've always gone in this more, some critics
have liked to say, almost like a dada streak.
I like to comment on politics comedically,
but it is not my lifeblood, it's not in my bone marrow.
I think we do it, and I do it when it strikes me as funny,
but we also do a lot of comedy that is very silly
and doesn't really have much to do with anything,
and probably is of no benefit to this country.
[LAUGHTER]
I've always said to people, if you're getting a message
from my show, you're wrong.
[LAUGHTER]
There's no message to my comedy.
We're just we're here to amuse.
WESLEY MORRIS: OK, that's fair.
OK.
This is a Brookline High School, or Brookline alumni question.
What's your favorite high school memory?
It's from Jason, who graduated in 1996.
CONAN O'BRIEN: He's a kid.
Let's see.
My favorite high school memory.
It might be that I got to do the--
this just in--
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: Breaking news at the JKF Library!
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, I got to be in this school talent
show my senior year.
I got to MC it.
And my co-MC was the school's janitor.
[LAUGHTER]
And I don't remember even how that happened,
but that was my introduction to show business,
was MC'ing seeing the senior show.
And I have an old black and white photograph of it,
where we're doing what looks to be--
I have no memory of it, but it looks
to be the lamest routine in the history of show business,
where the janitor had this big beard
and I'm made up to look like a ventriloquist's dummy.
And I'm sitting on his lap, and we're
doing a bit that looks absolutely dreadful.
[LAUGHTER]
And so, I remember that being just a big moment for me.
WESLEY MORRIS: Who is the best comic we don't know about,
and why aren't they famous yet?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Every time I say that, it turns out
they're really well-known.
I mean, I've said that about Louis CK, years ago.
WESLEY MORRIS: I mean, you said that years ago.
That didn't really happen.
CONAN O'BRIEN: It happened because I said it.
[LAUGHTER]
Welcome to delusion theater.
I'm trying to think.
WESLEY MORRIS: Well, who are some people you really like?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Pete Holmes is really great.
Right, Sona?
SONA MOVSESIAN: Yeah.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Pete Holmes is someone that we're working with
right now, who's a very talented comedian who people don't--
I think he's starting to become well-known.
He's a very good comic, so I would put
Pete Holmes in that category.
And I'll stick with him for now.
WESLEY MORRIS: OK.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I was going to see someone else,
but I don't like that guy.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: Poor guy.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Nah, he'll be fine.
He'll do very well.
WESLEY MORRIS: Let's see.
I just had a--
I should actually remove the ones that I've asked.
CONAN O'BRIEN: It looks like there's one word per--
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
You should see some of these.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh my, God!
WESLEY MORRIS: That's a short story.
CONAN O'BRIEN: That's a proclamation of some kind.
WESLEY MORRIS: What is your opinion of the homogenization
of network television to quote, "play to the Midwest
slash middle America," unquote.
That's from Mary Ellen Walsh, from Weymouth.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh.
I don't really think that's the case these days.
I think that there is--
I mean, television, in a way, you
could say it used to be more homogeneous, because there
was only three networks.
So I think it's less homogeneous now.
I think there's so much on television.
There's so much variety, and there's
so many people playing to certain niches
that I think it's the least homogeneous television's
ever been.
The fact is it's art meets commerce,
so there's always going to be an attempt to get the most
people under the tent.
You can't fault networks for doing that.
WESLEY MORRIS: Are you thinking about an audience
when you do the show?
CONAN O'BRIEN: No.
I don't think about it at all.
I don't think about it.
To me, that's an abstraction.
WESLEY MORRIS: And there's nobody--
is the difference maybe between TBS and NBC the notes you get?
CONAN O'BRIEN: There's not much--
yes, there's less of that like, it
would be really good if you could,
but I've never even let that sway me too much.
I do my thing my way.
That's the only thing I know how to do.
I don't know how to do it another way,
frankly, so I like to pretend that it
was my high sense of moral purpose, but it's not.
Again, it's just that this is how I know how to-- this
is what strikes me as funny.
This is the way I like to do it.
This is how I know how to do it.
I don't know how to do it any other way.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: So these are the people I find interesting.
This is the kind of show I want to do.
So if that becomes untenable, and there's no place to do it,
it's time to learn something else.
WESLEY MORRIS: But you also don't strike me as necessarily
a czar-like figure.
I mean, if I disagreed with you about the direction
a particular segment or something was going--
CONAN O'BRIEN: I'd crush you.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: OK.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I'd crush you like a bug.
WESLEY MORRIS: No, but, I mean, you'd
be open to the possibility.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, I like to collaborate,
but I'm also going to be honest.
I have some people that work with me here.
I'm strong willed, and when I see things a certain way,
and I think it's the right way to do it,
it's all I can do to just-- and people are saying dissenting
things--
when I see things a certain way, I become a little like Stalin
in my economic policies.
[LAUGHTER]
I believe in collectivizing grain.
Other than that, I'm quite kind.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: OK.
So we have time to take some questions from people
who've left them on Twitter.
If somebody could--
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh, my God.
WESLEY MORRIS: There's a screen that's coming down.
Look out.
STAGEHAND: Don't worry.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I wasn't told about this.
This is like something in a James Bond lair.
That they would--
All right.
Oh, thank you.
That's terrific.
WESLEY MORRIS: So I mean, how about you pick some of these
actually?
You can't - can that scroll up and down?
CONAN O'BRIEN: The first one I can see
is, what you see as a celeb's role in political activism?
Prolific like Clooney, reserved, or something in between?
From Kevin Slane @kslane.
Sorry.
[LAUGHTER]
There is his photo that he's chosen.
WESLEY MORRIS: You guys can see the photo.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh, you can't see the photo.
WESLEY MORRIS: He's having a great time.
CONAN O'BRIEN: He's having a great time in this photo.
He's just coming off the slopes and he's high.
And it's all good.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: I think is wearing a colander.
CONAN O'BRIEN: He thinks he's skied but he didn't ski.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm not a big believer--
contrary to why I'm being here--
I'm not someone who is comfortable
being a big activist, or someone who--
I've never felt like I was elected to anything.
And so, I'm always for myself a little wary of that.
Actually, as a fan of 19th century history,
I know that back in the 19th century, actors and comedians,
we were treated as second-class citizens.
I think we should go back to that time.
[LAUGHTER]
I really do sometimes think we've elevated--
we're asking Khloe Kardashian what about the euro.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: Well, she spends a lot of them.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: She's entitled.
CONAN O'BRIEN: It's just ridiculous.
There's a reverence for what celebrities think,
and anyone who is--
whenever there's a tragedy of some kind in the nation,
or something horrible happens, sometimes I've
been at events where someone says, can you tell us,
define courage for us.
And I think, don't ask me.
I have not earned the right to answer that question.
And there's these sections now in US
magazine, and all these different magazines where
they--
or people tweet about a national crisis.
WESLEY MORRIS: Conan, give us your thoughts
about the tsunami.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, exactly.
And then these people start--
Snooki tells us what should happen with TARP.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: TARP for her is a hair gel, isn't it?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
I become despondent when that happens,
and so, I, myself, like to--
I think it's just all--
I'm much more comfortable one-to-one,
or in a room like this talking to people,
and telling them at least what my experience was
like if they're interested.
But when it gets much beyond that--
and I'm going to get out there!
And I'm going to raise awareness on this issue!
I've never been quite comfortable with it.
Maybe I just haven't found the right issue,
but I haven't been comfortable with it.
WESLEY MORRIS: Is there a guest you
haven't had on for somewhat similar philosophical reasons?
Is there somebody that you just don't want to deal with?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yes!
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: Or you've had them on,
and after things went the way they did, you said never again.
CONAN O'BRIEN: I mean, I really do--
I'm not being cagey, just like thousands of people.
WESLEY MORRIS: You needn't name them.
I'm just wondering--
CONAN O'BRIEN: No, I think it's important to name.
[LAUGHTER]
There are people who are very self-serious.
And there's an attitude sometimes
when a guest comes out, and acts like, well, I suppose this
is what I'm supposed to do.
Have at it, you clown.
[LAUGHTER]
And they roll their eyes a lot, and a lot of, yes, well.
WESLEY MORRIS: At you?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, they have that--
it's an aura that's coming off of them,
and I have no patience for it.
I think, well, why did you come?
And they have a little bit of a feeling of they're
lowering themselves to be part of this farce,
but I suppose this is what people do.
So there are people like that who, the segment's over,
and I say, please, I just never want to see them again.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: But for the most part I get along with people,
and I can try and make it work.
WESLEY MORRIS: OK.
I mean, I've seen the discomfort that you've
had with some people who I won't name,
but, I mean, you can feel it.
And I don't recall ever seeing that person back on the show,
on either network.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, or alive.
WESLEY MORRIS: Stalin speaks!
Stalin speaks!
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
After the show, I'm just always like, get rid of them.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: That explains--
CONAN O'BRIEN: This isn't a cat, by the way.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll leave it at that.
But yeah, I don't know.
You need the right conditions.
These shows require-- there's a lot of variables.
There's the right kind of guest.
There's, how's the crowd today?
What happened in the news?
Sometimes they all line up.
It doesn't happen often, but when everything lines up,
it's magical.
And you're getting this taste of a drug,
that you'll do anything to get that taste again.
That's the secret of these shows.
You keep fighting back to even get
all nine tumblers to come up on the bell,
and then you're just ecstatic.
And sometimes you get close, but no, you just missed out.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
Bit
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
I'm in the "life is too short" category now.
I just don't have--
I used to be willing to pretty much do anything and try
and make anything work.
And then you get to a point where
you've been through a lot, you've
been doing it for a long time, and you think,
I don't think I'm going to win having this person on.
I think it's going to be a little bit of a--
it's not going to be so much fun.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: This person is a huge ego.
This person is wearing sunglasses
during the interview.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: This person is sitting like this.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, we're about Madeleine Albright.
[LAUGHTER]
Impossible.
Impossible woman.
And yeah, and they just have that attitude,
and you just think, I just don't want to do it anymore.
WESLEY MORRIS: You don't have to deal with it,
because it's not really--
it's your show.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Exactly.
WESLEY MORRIS: Let's do another Twitter question.
Oh, this is somewhat related to what you had mentioned earlier.
Comedy aside.
How would you convince youth of today--
I'm rewriting it-- to not be cynical about politics?
CONAN O'BRIEN: I think that relates a little bit to--
I think cynicism comes a lot from people
thinking they have no voice.
So you retreat to cynicism when you think you're not going to--
nothing's going to change if I get involved,
and the whole thing's rigged.
And I think that was, going back to really the reason
that we're here, that I think President Kennedy was
so brilliant at, is I think, you look at the political landscape
leading up to his presidency, and really
the biggest change overnight was that he very much
inspired people.
And people talk a lot about it now, and it's become so famous.
It's been talked about so much that it can almost
start to sound trite, but at the time
I do think that his wit and his ability to inspire young people
was something that was markedly different.
I mean, he's coming out of this, what many people now think
of as this very staid Eisenhower culture,
and then suddenly there's this very young president,
and he is telling people, you need to get involved.
And there's the Peace Corps, and there's
his famous inaugural address, and he's telling people
that it's really up to them.
And I think that is electrifying.
And so, I think the biggest way to
for people not to be cynical is to convince them, which
is true, that being involved actually
does make a difference.
I mean, look at the world we have now,
where Mark Zuckerberg changed our culture.
This is someone who, I don't think it's been 10 years yet,
and he completely changed the culture overnight.
Literally, almost overnight.
And I'm always telling people that work for me,
you would be shocked at how much older people don't know.
We don't really know what we're doing.
And I tell them, when you watch us working on the show,
we've got some knowledge from having done this
a couple of thousand times, and we're working hard,
but up to the last second, I'm trying jokes out
on the 21-year-old interns that work on the show, and saying,
does this makes sense to you?
Do you think this is good?
I'm always looking for the answer,
and I'm always telling them, I might be working for you
in five years.
That's the world we live in right now.
The media culture is changing so rapidly, anybody in this room--
a 19-year-old could be running the world in 10 years,
or have revolutionized the way we experience media.
So it's a very volatile but also really exciting time.
And I think the greatest weapon against cynicism
is to convince young people, it's amazing what you can do,
what you can accomplish if you get involved.
And if you don't--
being detached and cynical is a defense mechanism.
It's a lot easier to do that, than to try.
So why not?
Why not be cynical?
It's easy.
WESLEY MORRIS: You have this really amazing connection
to young people.
I mean, I remember being really excited when
your NBC show started.
I was a freshman.
And it was this thing, that we all
had to go see what this guy Conan
O'Brien was going to be like.
And it started in college for me,
I continued to watch the show--
it's a gateway drug to nighttime television.
CONAN O'BRIEN: That's how we designed it.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: But you have managed
to be the young person's late night person.
And a lot of people support you, a lot of young people
are huge fans of yours.
They support you in ways that you don't see
people supporting Letterman.
You also were somewhat scandal-free.
CONAN O'BRIEN: So far.
WESLEY MORRIS: All right, yes.
Yes.
Don't do anything to screw that up.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh, it happened.
[LAUGHTER]
You just don't know about it.
[LAUGHTER]
WESLEY MORRIS: There are some journalists in this room who
will dig that up.
But I mean, I think the power that you
have with young people and the relationship that you have--
part of it is social media, but I mean,
it existed before there was Twitter.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, I think the thing a lot of people
respond to, which, again, I'm not
trying to sell anybody anything in a way.
I think there is a sense--
I've always been very clear.
This is who I am.
These are the flaws.
That didn't go so well.
In the show, if something doesn't work,
I'm the first one on the show to tell you it didn't work.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: And maybe to go on at length
about how it didn't work.
There's not an attempt to convince people and market
to them.
I think young people are extremely
sensitive to being marketed to, or conned,
or sold on something.
They're always been intelligent.
They're hyper-intelligent about someone
older than them trying to convince them of something.
So rule number one is just be yourself.
And that's actually the first thing--
when I got The Late Night Show-- and I bring him
up now because they just did this great documentary
about Johnny Carson, but one of the first people I talked to
was Johnny Carson.
He said, just be yourself.
He said, it's the only way it can work.
He didn't say, it "would" work, because he's being honest.
He didn't know me.
He thought, you might be yourself
and it would be terrible.
But he said, be yourself.
It's the only way.
And there's an honesty to that, and I
do think that that's a little bit timeless.
I think if you--
when you're putting on a persona,
there's a lot of people in television
that have a persona that is almost the exact opposite
of who they really are.
And, again, I'm not going to name names,
but there are people that are just
pushing on you this idea that they're really happy,
and they're great, and they're super nice, and they're not.
And you experience that and you think--
What I've always been interested in
is the shortest amount of distance between who I really
am and what people see.
And I think it's impossible to have people
see the exact real you, and they probably shouldn't, but this
is pretty close.
And I think there's a sense there that maybe people think,
at least he's being honest.
And that show wasn't great, and that didn't go that well,
but he made fun of himself, and was honest about the fact
that it didn't go well.
And everything that happened two years ago, whatever anybody
thought of it, it was honest.
This is what happened, and this is
how I reacted day, to day, to day, and this is where I went.
And I think it's a reaction to that.
So I think there's something about not trying to project
something fake to people.
WESLEY MORRIS: Well, what did you--
going back to The Tonight Show situation-- what did
you hope to do with that show?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Keep it for a while.
[LAUGHTER]
This is a true story over an elliptical machine in my house,
because it helps me calm down to work out.
And so, the whole Tonight Show thing happens,
and then I go on this tour, and then I come back from the tour,
and then we're going to make this new show with TBS.
And my daughter--
I never really even talked to my kids about what was happening.
They just knew daddy, this crazy stuff is happening,
but it's all fine, it's all good.
And I'm working out on my little elliptical machine,
and my daughter Nev, who at the time was seven,
wandered into my room.
And I'm on my elliptical machine,
and I'm going to start the TBS show in about three weeks.
And I'm just working on my elliptical machine,
she came in.
And she said, daddy?
I said, yeah.
And she said, you're starting a new show?
And I said, yeah.
I'm starting a new show in about three weeks.
And she's looking at me, and I'm on the machine, and she said,
can you try and keep this one longer than the last one?
[LAUGHTER]
Get out of here!
[LAUGHTER]
So she's getting her allowance back in nine years.
[LAUGHTER]
But it's just this great honest moment, where I was like, yeah,
I'm going to really try.
Like I say, all TV shows, even if you been doing them forever,
are a work in progress.
So you get a show, you start, you have your problems,
you start working through them.
And I always thought, well, I won't really know--
because it was a process that was interrupted-- but
we'll do it here.
We'll do it at TBS.
So we'll find it here.
WESLEY MORRIS: OK.
I don't know-- oh, wait.
Yeah, so the screen does move.
How important do you think your social media
team has been to your success?
CONAN O'BRIEN: It's been huge.
I have great people.
I found social media as a necessity.
I was not--
I'm kind of a Luddite.
I'm not good with--
WESLEY MORRIS: Do you remember the day someone walked up
to you and said, Twitter!
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh, I remember exactly what happened.
We were thinking about launching this tour.
And I was off the air, and I was forbidden--
it was legally prohibited from television, radio,
and these different media things.
And someone said, you should go on Twitter.
And I said, I don't know.
Go on Twitter.
Then I started thinking about it.
I started looking into it.
The first thing we did is find out, legally,
can I go on Twitter?
We find out that--
Now, trust me, lawyers, they'll put that in.
But this was such a new world we were in, that they
hadn't prohibited Twitter.
It wasn't in there.
So it it was actually--
you imagine yourself being locked in a tower,
and there's no other way except you find a little crack
and you can slip a note through it.
It was the one way I could talk to people.
So I started to--
I realized it's just a joke-writing exercise.
It's actually a very good exercise.
You get so many characters, you can't go beyond that.
And if you can't say something funny,
it's like writing a haiku.
If you can't do it in that form, it's a great discipline.
Jokes probably shouldn't be longer than that.
So it forced me to-- how many characters is it?
It's--
WESLEY MORRIS: 160.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, I'm constantly writing something,
and then someone on my team would be like,
that's one character too many.
Ah!
But then you realize a way to shorten it,
and it's shortening it, and shortening it,
and shortening it.
And it's actually why I believe the one
person whose speeches endure more than anybody is Lincoln.
He just obsessively-- everyone else in his era was verbose,
and would speak for--
famously, the guy who spoke before Lincoln at Gettysburg
spoke for four hours, and everybody was just
melting into their beards.
And then Lincoln gets up and gives the Gettysburg Address.
And I defy anyone to find an extra word in there.
He just boiled things down, and had a little bit
of a run, and then a short phrase that just punctuates it,
and is haunting.
And so, I actually think-- it's crazy.
I think people were going to write these really prophetic,
amazing things on Twitter, because it's going
to force them to be economical.
It's going to force them to say what you want in a very--
it's like the same rule for everybody.
It's very democratic.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
And so, you obviously embrace it, but I mean, do you do all--
is everything that I get in my Twitter stream
from you, from you?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, they're all from me.
What I do is, if I talk to the writers about like,
who's got funny ideas?
Because it is every day, so I'd be
lying if I said every single thing that I come up with
was my idea, because it's not.
So I get help writing them from--
I work with really funny, creative people.
But I write a lot of them.
I help craft a bunch, sort of the tone of it.
Because it's got to be me.
It can't just sound like somebody else.
WESLEY MORRIS: Oh, they sound like you.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
And the social media thing has been--
everyone's wondering, how is TV--
and I talked about this a little bit
yesterday at this cable convention,
but it's worth repeating-- everyone's
wondering how TV and the social media
is going to work together, and does it work together?
And here's an example of when it really worked together.
About a month ago, Will Ferrell called me up and said,
I want to announce that I'm doing Anchorman 2.
Can I come on your show as Ron Burgundy,
and interrupt the show, and announce
that I'm making a new movie?
And I said, no.
[LAUGHTER]
I said, that would be fantastic.
So we worked it out.
And then we decided--
old school television is you don't give anything away.
You say, tune into Conan for a special surprise at 11:00.
That's not the way the media works anymore.
It is completely changed.
So what we did was we put together these pictures of me
with Will as Ron Burgundy, and we tweeted
to the 5-point-something million people that we have,
and put on Facebook for all the people
we have there, that, look who is coming to my show tonight.
And it's me with Ron Burgundy.
We started to drive this huge wave of interest
through social media, that came back around and created
a wave that gave us the highest rating that we had had
at that point for a year on the Conan show,
which then generates more interest on the social network.
So it's a biosphere where everything's working together.
It doesn't happen that often, but I got a glimpse--
I thought I had a quick glimpse of, this is the future.
That everyone's on social media, and that's maybe driving him
to an event over here.
They see that.
That creates a number of viewers for that show,
but then that feeds into other social media sites.
WESLEY MORRIS: Well, can I tell you the downside of that?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: There was so much Ron Burgundy-ness
during that period, I thought Ron Burgundy had died.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh.
WESLEY MORRIS: I'm like, oh wait!
He's not even real.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Right, right.
WESLEY MORRIS: I mean, it was it was so
saturated that I actually didn't know what was going on.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Well, that's the other thing too,
is that it's a culture where people go from, I'm interested,
to, I'm sick of it, in about eight seconds.
So that's the downside.
WESLEY MORRIS: It got me to the show though.
I'll say that.
Did you know marrying Scott and David on your show
would prompt POTUS to support marriage equality.
CONAN O'BRIEN: No.
I don't think it did obviously.
That was just another thing that happened accidentally, is
we had two people--
someone who works for me on the show, Scott Cronick
was intending-- while we were in New York, because it's legal
there-- to marry his partner.
And then someone said, Conan you can go online
and you can marry them if you want to do that.
And we just looked into it, and I
was able to go online and get the ministerial certificate.
And I was able to go on a neighboring site
and become a Jedi knight.
[LAUGHTER]
And got like a dental degree.
I mean, it was just--
it's scary.
In about 20 minutes I was the most learned man in the world.
[LAUGHTER]
But we did that, and I actually really liked it
because it was a real thing, and it meant a lot
to Scott and to his partner.
And we did it in a real way.
We didn't do it in a comedic way.
And it was something that they wanted to do.
So I thought, that was really nice.
But it didn't come from an activist spirit.
It didn't come from a--
again, the best things just happen.
They just happened because life takes you that way.
WESLEY MORRIS: But isn't that a really good example of what
we were talking about before, which
is this organic idea of the way politics can work in comedy?
I don't think that-- this is it is readable as a political act.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: But the nature of it, from your standpoint,
was just humanist.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah.
WESLEY MORRIS: And that's the whole thing about--
CONAN O'BRIEN: I think that's--
there's a place we're getting to in our country
where things are so polarized, and everything is--
we've always been a polarized country.
It seems to have gotten to an extreme right now.
But you do think that--
people seem to be able to tell when
something comes from a real place,
and it's not just doctrine.
WESLEY MORRIS: No, that seemed really--
CONAN O'BRIEN: I need to say this
in order to fit into this party or that party.
People seem to know the difference,
and they seem to accept it.
And that's probably the way--
eventually, that's how most change happens,
is it comes from--
it's not Hollywood actors are comedians
making change, it's individual human beings organically coming
to a place, and taking a leap of faith.
That's what gets us there.
It's not someone from a movie telling us what we should do.
WESLEY MORRIS: You mean Chuck and Larry,
their big wedding didn't--
Adam Sandler--
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh, that.
Yes, yes.
I'm sure that had a huge influence.
WESLEY MORRIS: Did you get any feedback?
CONAN O'BRIEN: Yeah, we had a lot of positive feedback.
WESLEY MORRIS: Was there any feedback that surprised you,
I guess?
CONAN O'BRIEN: No, I wasn't.
I was more surprised that it did feel
like there was not a lot of--
there was more of just an acceptance, I think.
And not that I was exposed to that much criticism
from people who wouldn't like that,
but it did feel like this country's been moving
that way for quite a while.
And obviously, the big debate now
is whether this is something that people nationally
want to make an issue, and how should this
be treated constitutionally.
But I think that was just a moment, that
was a moment with real people, and it
was I think accepted that way.
WESLEY MORRIS: Have you come to regret the level of candor
and honesty on display in the documentary Conan O'Brien--
CONAN O'BRIEN: No, that was always the intention,
was not to make-- when I went and met with the director,
he said, I don't want to make Rattle and Hum.
I don't want to make anything that deifies.
I was like, neither do I. Let's just--
WESLEY MORRIS: You went in the opposite direction, actually.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh, yeah.
We went to actually--
just showing how much--
I mean, he actually edited it to show much more fatigue,
the most exhausting-- he only use the moments when I
my most tired and most exhausted.
But I think people need to know that this is how hard it is.
There's a lot of work, and the theme of that movie,
Conan O'Brien Can't Stop, is I cannot--
I am constantly pushing myself, and pushing myself,
and then complaining to people around me
that I'm being pushed too hard.
And then when people around me say, well, do you want to stop?
I snap at them and say, how dare you suggest I stop?
So you get a nice insight.
They should study it.
Psychiatrists should study it.
[LAUGHTER]
It's an interesting look at someone
who's resenting how hard they're working, when no one's making
them work that hard.
It's all coming from within, and ultimately they
blame their parents.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm glad you're in the front row for that.
WESLEY MORRIS: So we have to wrap up.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Mm-hmm.
WESLEY MORRIS: But I've been given a request in closing.
You sort of did it a little bit earlier,
but someone wants you to do your JFK impersonation.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Oh, it's funny, it's not-- it's funny,
it's really not a JFK impression.
I used to do--
when I worked on The Simpsons, there's
a Mayor Quimby who's clearly a Kennedy.
And I noticed that whenever I would go into that on the show,
I'll tell a joke, and if it does particularly well,
and the crowd's cheering, I just start
to go like, we can do better! and we'll do better--
And they start cheering more, and it became this thing.
And I think it's a whole generation that
thought that it came from me doing Mayor Quimby, which
was a Simpsons thing.
WESLEY MORRIS: Right.
CONAN O'BRIEN: And it always worked on the tour,
and it was something that just morphed out of--
there was a very, very silly piece that I did on stage years
ago, where I played Ted Kennedy as a baby.
[LAUGHTER]
I did this in my 20s.
And I would-- literally, the lights would come up on stage,
and it was the silliest dumbest thing ever,
but I'd be wearing a diaper and a bonnet, on my back,
and I'd be going-- a deb, deb, deb, deb, deb.
[LAUGHTER]
Deb, deb, deb, deb.
Deb, deb, deb, deb, deb, deb, deb.
Deb deb.
And then I'd stop for second, and everyone would wait.
And then I go, ah, deb, deb, deb, deb.
[LAUGHTER]
And it was so ridiculous.
And you just got me uninvited here.
[LAUGHTER]
Caroline's going to-- what did he close with?
[LAUGHTER]
You don't want to know.
WESLEY MORRIS: You don't want to know.
[LAUGHTER]
CONAN O'BRIEN: Deb, deb, deb, deb.
[LAUGHTER]
But It's just silly.
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah.
Well, thank you guys for coming.
Thank you, Conan, for--
CONAN O'BRIEN: Thanks for coming out, everybody.
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
Thank you for doing this.
WESLEY MORRIS: Of course.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Great job.
That's was great.
Thank you for doing it.
WESLEY MORRIS: It was good.
I'm feeling good.
So I think they're going to take you that way.
CONAN O'BRIEN: Go that way?
WESLEY MORRIS: Yeah, and then--
CONAN O'BRIEN: Bye everybody!
[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]