Last week, The A.V. Club spoke with talk-show host Conan O'Brien about his current career: Hosting the Emmys, planning to take over The Tonight Show, and taking his own show on the road. In part two of our interview, O'Brien digs into his past, discussing how he got where he is, how many crappy jobs he had to take along the way, and what it's like being the hired entertainer at a 7-year-old's birthday party.
The A.V. Club: You were the president of The Harvard Lampoon twice. What was the Conan O'Brien reign like? Did you rule with an iron fist?
Conan O'Brien: I was like [Romanian dictator Nicolae] Ceausescu. I was malevolent and arbitrary. It was like when Stalin, toward the end of his reign, just turned on people for no reason. So there was that quality to my rule: I was the idiot king. When a king dies suddenly of an expected illness, and a 16-year-old is elevated to the throne and immediately declares purges of everyone around him—that was my reign at the Lampoon.
AVC: Considering The Harvard Lampoon's reputation, it seems like you should have gotten a television contract along with your diploma.
COB: I was shocked when that didn't happen.
AVC: Didn't you have offers? Weren't there people paying attention to your writing and career?
COB: No one was that interested at the time. That thing was just starting to happen, that pre-professional aspect to the Lampoon that later became the stereotype. I mean, there were a lot of people in my class who didn't go into television. My Lampoon friend Greg Daniels [later of Simpsons, King Of The Hill, and The Office fame. —ed.] and I said, "Let's give this a shot, let's go out to L.A. and try." So we went. The first job we got was on Not Necessarily The News, which was an HBO show. It was a good job for us, because it got us into the union. And it got us some experience. We were locked in a fluorescent room. We could've been accountants, because they locked us in a room and said, "Write visual jokes. Write gags." We wrote a ton of jokes that they could use to accompany footage. That was actually a pretty good exercise, because all these years later, I still feel like for a couple of years at the beginning of my career, my job was just to think about jokes and visual humor. And I was literally chained to a desk doing it. It was a good way to do it.
AVC: Did you come up with Sniglets during your time at Not Necessarily The News?
COB: No, that was Rich Hall. My thing that I always wanted to do was have Rich Hall do Sniglets, but use real words. [Adopts sinister voice.] "The act of taking someone's life against their will is called 'murder.'" Like, make them really, really dark.
AVC: That would make people think.
COB: Of course, that wouldn't have sold any of the Sniglet books.
AVC: Early in your career, you appeared in corporate infomercials. Do any of them stand out?
COB: I did an infomercial for the Musical Instruments Vendors Association Of America. That's not their actual title, but I don't remember what it was. They had a handsome-headed man who was there to narrate it. He'd say, "Don't be the know-it-all salesman when you're selling a musical instrument, like this guy!" They used me because I could improvise, which meant I was a comedy writer who could perform, which meant they didn't have to pay a writer. They hired me and it was not scale, it was kind of an illegal job. And then I'd be the know-it-all who alienates customers. I'd say "Oh, you don't want that bass. That has three-amp-per-unit sensor round on the third pickup!" Just babbling, and the customer would shrug very broadly and say, "This guy is ridiculous. You're giving me too much information!" And then he would storm out of the office. And then they'd say "You should be more like this guy!" and I would be more accommodating and listen more than talk. I didn't know anything. They told me I'd have to bring my own makeup. I didn't even know what that was. I went to a mall and went to the women's makeup counter and bought some stuff. And drove my $300 navy-blue Isuzu Opal to some part of the Valley that took an hour and a half to get to, and sat in a parking lot in 100˚ heat, putting this glop on my face. I walked in and I looked like a melting candle. I looked like Jack Klugman in the last season of Quincy. It wasn't good. So there you have it. We all do things. I was a male whore for a while.
AVC: You also were an entertainer at a 7-year-old's birthday party at least once. Care to elaborate on that?
COB: It was horrible. Bombed. Completely bombed. Those kids were assholes. They didn't know quality when they saw it. A friend of mine and I who was a fellow improviser, a guy I knew at the Groundlings Theatre, he came to me, he said, "Hey, I got this gig to entertain at a kid's party, and they're paying, and it's cash, man." It sounded like a drug deal. "It's cash, and they want us to go there. We got to work fast." So we went there and we had guitars and pranced around. It was classic. The kids were like Easter Island statues. They just stared at us. I think the mom who had hired us was just like, "What is this crap?" We were doing weird characters and stuff. I think we got paid, but it was one of those things where they pay you grudgingly. You almost wish they didn't pay you. They really despise you. Not good. People say all experience is good—not true. That was a complete waste of time, and humiliating. If I could get into a time machine, I wouldn't use it to save Abraham Lincoln's wife, or cure polio a little earlier. I'd use it to wipe out that birthday.
AVC: Speaking of humiliation, during all that time, you also worked at Wilsons House Of Suede And Leather.
COB: What was worse, I was mostly working a desk job at Wilsons. So it wasn't even getting to handle the amazing suede merchandise. I was mostly at a desk. I was the male secretary to this hot woman who used to come to work wearing a miniskirt and white cowboy boots. And I was her assistant. It was like a bad porno. "Conan, can you come in here for a minute? I need you to help me clean out my pipes," or something. Never happened. I used to play guitar music just to see if I could get her in the mood. But no, nothing ever happened
AVC: You were fired from Not Necessarily The News, right?
COB: Not really. It makes a better story to say you were fired. I think they downsized. HBO cut their budget, so they had to lose five writers or something. They kept the people with the most seniority, and let the rest of us go. It was pretty amicable. "Fired" has a better ring to it. It's a better story if I had a lot of hardships. "They fired my ass. I was embezzling from the company."
AVC: From there, you were one of the writers and producer of the short-lived Wilton North Report. Paul Krassner wrote an article about it.
COB: Paul Krassner was there. The whole time we were trying to make the show, he was saying, "This can't work." What was interesting about that show—there's no better experience in television than to work on a flop. Because you learn all these amazing things that help you later on. It's being a part of a horrible shipwreck that makes you a better sailor, provided you stay in the business. I learned a lot.
When Late Night first came on the air and was having trouble, people were saying "We're going under, we're going to get cancelled." I remember thinking, "I've been on one of those, and this just doesn't feel like that. Our show gets better every day, and that show didn't." That show sort of felt like everything went wrong. It had this feel to it where I didn't even know what we were going to do next week. Whereas on Late Night, at the beginning, we always had a lot of ideas. We always felt we had a good show for the next day. We never had that feeling of "Omigod, I'm lost." It was just convincing the rest of America or NBC that we knew what we were doing.
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