Pee Wee Herman, Eli Manning, John Krasinski, Max Weinberg and a stolen glass of vodka. All the right ingredients required to have a wild bash with the gangliest, most lovable television personality this side of late night.
It's been over five months since Conan O'Brien went off the air, following a very public dispute with his now-former employer NBC about moving The Tonight Show off its longstanding 11:30 timeslot into the next day. Responding to a groundswell of online support, Conan set off on a 30-city tour, which he's been doing for almost two months now. The two shows he did this week, however, held special meaning both for Conan and his fans. They marked Conan's return to the place he'd thrived in the most: New York City.
The live show, as many have found out already, shares many similarities to his old Late Night program (if only nostalgically), but also differs in so many ways. It is not just a live version of a talk show. It is instead an exhilarating variety show—incorporating stand-up, video sketches, song numbers, offbeat conversations, prop comedy, celebrity cameos and audience interaction. It really is Conan O'Brien at his most comfortable. Irreverent, self-deprecating and off-the-wall nuts.
I went to see his second show on Wednesday night, and it took a while for me to adjust to the fact that I was watching Conan unshackled by television standards and not forcing out jokes from cue cards. Remember how awesomely loose he was during the writer's strike, when he'd just wing it night after night? It's like that, but even better. He'd talk about his sex life with his wife, he'd solicit women in the audience to be Coco groupies, and there was this strange but exciting tinge in my ears to hear him and sidekick Andy Richter uncensored, freely doling out "fuck" and "shit" without a care. It was just profane enough to be exciting, but without shattering Conan's image as a corny innocent dork.
My favorite moment of the night came early. Not long after Conan took the stage, someone arrived late with a glass of straight vodka in hand, which Conan promptly stole and slowly drank for the next fifteen minutes. When time came for the first song number—a nonsensical upperclass Massachusetts version of Tony Joe White's "Poke Salad Annie"—a roadie ran out to hand Conan his guitar and cleared the glass of vodka from the stage floor. "Hey, where the fuck're you going with that?" Conan barked, commanding the guy to come back with the drink, which he then chugged to thundering applause.
Though it shouldn't be a surprise, it must be said that Conan has the best band in the talk show business, rivaled perhaps only by Jimmy Fallon's The Roots. After Reggie Watts' opening act (which was hilariously offbeat in itself) but before Conan's entrance, the Max Weinberg 7-turned-Tonight Show Band-turned-Legally Prohibited Band entertained the crowd hardcore with a couple of boisterous numbers, including LaBamba's rendition of Curtis Mayfield's "Move on Up." Max Weinberg hadn't been the band's drummer for the tour—his regular replacement James Wormworth took up the mantle—but in a surprise appearance, Weinberg took the sticks for an encore performance of The Band's "The Weight," much to the fans' delight. Recently, there'd been much rumors about a falling out between Weinberg and Conan, and Weinberg's status on Conan's upcoming TBS show currently remains unknown; so to see him show up and hug Conan before joining the band was not only surprising, but also reassuring.
Two nostalgic Late Night bits that made a return were the Masturbating Bear and the Walker Texas Ranger Lever, met with much enthusiasm by all. Conan remarked that he would need help from a strong man to continue pulling the lever, and brought out Giants quarterback Eli Manning, which prompted a fun mix of cheers and boos (the crowd, after all, weren't all New Yorkers). Two guys a couple of rows ahead of me were clearly Giants fans, though, as they jumped to their feet and hugged each other in an explicit public display of happiness. Conan quipped that pulling the lever would be the greatest challenge in Manning's life, to which he jested back in agreement, "Superbowl? No. This is it." Next on lever duty following Manning was The Office's John Krasinski, who was also in previous night's show. Finally, Conan ended the segment with perhaps the most famous Walker clip in Late Night history; the one where a pre-Sixth Sense Haley Joel Osment utters six immortals words: "Walker told me I have AIDS."
Conan's certainly not short on celebrity friends. Also making an appearance was Pee Wee Herman doing an excerpt from his upcoming Broadway show. Pee Wee was slightly off-character, as well, slipping a couple of mild swears and asking a lady in the audience how far she would go with Conan. The night before, his friends Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert showed up for a rematch of their previous dance-off, while Bill Hader and Paul Rudd came out to pull the Walker lever. You can check Wikipedia for a full list of the celebs that made surprise appearances in different cities during the tour.
Holding his New York shows at the famous Radio City Music Hall was monumental for two reasons. The first reason has to do with geography. The venue is literally next door to 30 Rockefeller Center, the famous building housing NBC, where Conan taped his Late Night show for 17 years. Whether or not it was an intentional move, Conan made sure to joke at the fact that he was only feet away from the people that essentially fired him. It was an awkward homecoming, but it's the kind of awkward that has always defined Conan's personality as a comedian.
Despite the 60 Minutes profile where he insisted that he's doing fine and expressed an understanding of why he was the one chosen to be dropped, he realized that there's a wealth of opportunity in taking shots at NBC execs and Jay Leno, which he didn't shy away from doing onstage (without naming names, of course—legality and stuff). At one point, he mocked Jay Leno's voice and then reminded the crowd that, officially, it was an impression of rapper Ludacris.
The second reason, as Conan noted himself, has to do with the fact that the tour is the first time anyone has paid to see him. Unlike so many of his fellow talk show hosts, Conan didn't come up the ranks as a stand-up comedian or even a performer of any kind. Before getting the gig as the host of Late Night with Conan O'Brien back in 1993, Conan sharp-tuned his comedy chops as a writer, sitting behind the scenes on shows like Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons. During his tenure as host of Late Night and even the ill-fated Tonight Show, Conan would often mock-antagonize the audience to ignore his show's glaring faults and shortcomings, since they're free anyway. On the tour, he has so such safety net; even confidently declaring that his goal for the night would be for the paying audience to "walk out of here tonight thinking, 'That was sorta worth it.'"
What went unmentioned is the fact that, as TMZ reported, Conan isn't pocketing a dime off of the tour, which was put together long before his surprise TBS deal as a way to keep his uprooted crew employed.
The show closed with a speech that's expected, but still very much gratifying. Conan expressed the importance of his return to New York, given how significant the city had been to his career in showbusiness. Starting from his days as a writer on SNL, where he won his first Emmy, to the Late Night show that changed his life. "This city has given so much to me," he cracked, as the crowd sent their love back.
If I may speculate, it almost sounded like there's a part of Conan that just wants to come back to his adopted hometown, and I'm sure many of his fans would like it fine if he does his TBS show from the Big Apple. It would certainly be a return to status quo, not just for him but also his band and crew, most of whom have strong ties to the East Coast. Conan himself assured the audience that, despite what people might say, he hasn't "gone LA." But seeing how he recently sold his Central Park condo, it's unlikely that he wants to put his family (especially his young children) through another big move, only a year after the one they presumed to be permanent.
A New Yorker can dream, though.
