I will never forget what Keith said when I asked him how he felt about the news that Conan O’Brien said would be taking over The Tonight Show. He said it reminded him of the scene in Goodfellas where Joe Pesci thinks he’s becoming a made man only to get assassinated gangland-style. It seemed too good to be true. Hot headed punks like Pesci don’t get to be Made Men and eight-foot-tall hyperactive, super-genius goofballs like Conan aren’t supposed to take over Johnny Carson’s vacated throne.
Keith wasn’t saying Conan wasn’t good enough to take over the most prestigious, high profile position in all of late-night comedy. He was saying that Conan was, if anything, too good, too weird and too brazenly original for The Tonight Show’s mass audience.
Watching Late Night With Conan O’Brien I’ve often had the feeling that Conan was getting away with something. Let the world have Jay Leno. Conan was and is for us; the comedy geeks, insomniacs, potheads, oddballs and night owls. Conan seemed to inhabit the same crazy upside down world as After Hours, a nighttime realm where the rules went out the window and a cosmic and comic anarchy reigned.
With apologies to Hannah Arendt, Leno represents to me the evil of banality, the tragedy of a gifted stand-up comedian dumbing down his material for the lowest common denominator. In sharp contrast Conan bravely if insanely seems to assume that his audience is every bit as weird and smart and off-kilter as himself. He is a glorious anomaly, a beautiful freak, a man who became a television institution without compromising his fundamental weirdness.
You really have to like someone to welcome them into your home for an hour five nights a week. We have an intense relationship with our late night heroes. That’s why Johnny Carson’s final show became instantly iconic, David Letterman is a comedy God and it seemed positively perverse to give late-night shows to Chevy Chase and Jerry Lewis, men infamous for having phenomenally shitty personalities. Seriously, say what you will about my mother or my religion but disparage Conan, Letterman, Colbert or Stewart and I’ll punch you right in your fucking face. Christ, I even got choked up during the final episode of The Larry Sanders Show. Even fictional talk show hosts have a funny way of tugging at our heartstrings.
Like a lot of Late Night fans I worry that Conan will have to water down the weirdness to appeal to The Tonight Show audience, that he’ll have to appeal to Joe and Jane Whitebread as well as aficionados of The Masturbating Bear or Brian Stack’s racist ghost of a forties crooner.
So I was more emotionally invested in the final episode in the final episode of Late Night With Conan O’Brien than I have been in most Presidential elections. It was the climax of a week thick with nostalgia as Conan brought back favorite guests and indulged in an extended deluge of greatest hits.