When we’d talk about serious stuff sometimes he’d deflate the moment by turning to me and like sort of bowing in this insulting kind of Jackie Chan way and saying like, “As is taught in the Talmud,” just sort of like, there’s just no need for that and nothing to do with what we were talking about. It actually was over Jewish stuff, which is incredibly funny. I think you mentioned that Conan O’Brien can’t stop - it’s really more of a pathological disorder sort of diagnosis. It was like cruel and funny and had weird references in it - like how does this brain do that stuff? And then Conan would remember some story of some encounter with some celebrity on the show like 15, 17 years ago and it’s like, he also keeps all that in his mind. Conan would play a lot of pop songs and sort of improvise lyrics, he’d suddenly do a whole improvised verse about Kiley that rhymed. And then on top of that, Conan’s also doing these left hooks where he’ll just suddenly turn, he has a guitar sometimes - at some point he’ll just turn to Brian Kiley, the head monologue writer. He’s making final decisions on which monologue jokes.Īll of this stuff is happening, and in the middle of that, Conan and Andy are going off on these Baroque riffs. And then they’re teasing up his hair and putting his makeup on. or just with a question about a segment they have to do. And then sometimes the talent booker comes in with talent. It’s a sort of L-shaped area where he has a bathroom - and he does have a mirror - but also the four monologue writers the head writer Conan’s assistant Andy Richter Jeff Ross, executive producer and a hair and a makeup person. Every day they tape at 4:30, so this happens at 3:45 and it’s in Conan’s - to call it dressing room suggests like a small space with a lighted mirror, but really it’s like, almost half the size of a studio apartment. This is during this final meeting, if I could paint a picture of the scene.
#Simpsons late night host writer series#
We had a series of deadlines for monologue jokes, meetings with different parts of the staff, including a daily meeting with Conan just to go over monologue. Conan - because I was in monologue - I had a very steady rhythm to the day. There was a morning production meeting where all the producers and writers were screening footage and discussing stories and then assignments would get doled out. “The Daily Show” ran sort of like a newsroom. How did it compare to other jobs you had? You were just coming off of “The Daily Show.” If Letterman was self-deprecating, Conan had the nerve to question the trappings of the whole talk show enterprise. O’Brien’s novel energy, rich with recurring characters and fourth-wall-breaking gags, was slow to catch on, but his tenure left an indelible impression on the late night landscape. O’Brien was the first member of Gen X to host a late-night show on a major network, and he was filling the mammoth shoes of David Letterman, who debuted the program and revolutionized the stodgy talk show format. “It was reported to me exactly as, ‘You’re never gonna believe what Justin’s brother’s gonna do.’ It was such a sort of historic-sounding, paradigm-shifting, fault-line-fracturing thing.”
“This is how I heard any of it at all,” Kutner remembers.
“A good friend of mine went to Harvard with one of his brothers, Justin O’Brien,” said Kutner, who would go on to write for O’Brien’s short stint on “The Tonight Show” and its TBS follow-up, “Conan,” which airs its final episode Thursday, capping the host’s nearly 30-year career in late-night. Nearly 28 years ago Conan O’Brien filmed himself walking to his first day of work.Īlong the way, his doorman, hopscotching children and a horse and buggy driver, reminded him he was under “a lot of pressure” and threatened that “he better be good.” O’Brien, an accomplished writer for “SNL” and the “The Simpsons,” but a limited on-screen presence, was about to lead “Late Night.” His coronation was a surprise for many, but for Rob Kutner it was even crazier.
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