Profile of Conan O'Brien on Famous Like Me

Conan Christopher O’Brien (born April 18, 1963) is an Irish American comedian. He has been host of the television program Late Night with Conan O’Brien on the NBC network since 1993. He is to succeed Jay Leno as the host of The Tonight Show in 2009. Conan O'Brien also owns his own production company, Conaco, which produces Late Night as well as the unsuccessful 2001 reality series Lost.

Biography

O’Brien was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He is the third of six children and one of four boys. His father, Dr. Thomas O’Brien, was a research physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, specializing in infectious disease. His mother, Ruth Reardon O’Brien, is a former well-known lawyer at the Boston law firm of Ropes & Gray. His sister Jane is a comedy writer and producer. O’Brien is a distant cousin of Denis Leary through marriage; contrary to popular belief, they are not actually related through a recent common ancestor.

On January 12, 2002, O’Brien married advertising executive Liza Powel in her hometown of Seattle, Washington, in a nuptual Mass at St. James Cathedral. They have one daughter, Neve, born on October 14, 2003 in New York City. They are expecting a baby boy this November , .

Education

After graduating as the valedictorian from Brookline High School (Brookline, Massachusetts), O’Brien entered Harvard University. Throughout his college career, he was a writer for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine. During his junior and senior years, O’Brien served as the Lampoon's president, making him only the second person ever to serve as president twice, and the first person to have done it in 85 years. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1985 with a concentration in American History and Literature.

Television career

O’Brien moved to Los Angeles upon graduation to join the writing staff of HBO's Not Necessarily the News. He spent two years with that show, and performed regularly with improvisational groups like The Groundlings. He also acted in corporate infomercials to earn money during this period.

After Not Necessarily the News, O’Brien worked as the warm-up comic for The Wilton North Report, a Fox show that was on the air for just four weeks. O’Brien then moved on to the Happy Happy Good Show, a stage show being put on in Chicago, Illinois at the time.

In January 1988 Saturday Night Live's executive producer Lorne Michaels hired O’Brien as a writer. During his 3½ years on SNL he wrote such recurring sketches as "Mr. Short-Term Memory" and "The Girl Watchers", the latter of which was first performed by Tom Hanks and Jon Lovitz. Additionally, O’Brien wrote the sketch "Nude Beach", which became infamous due to the fact that the word penis appeared in it no less than 42 times, much of it in the form of song. He also appeared as an extra in some skits, occasionally with a speaking role. In 1989, he and the other SNL writers were awarded an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series.

In the spring of 1991, O’Brien left SNL to write and produce a pilot for the television show Lookwell, starring Adam West. It was broadcast on NBC in July but was not picked up as a series. That Fall, O’Brien signed on as a writer and producer for the Fox series The Simpsons, where he also became a supervising producer. In a speech he gave at Harvard on Class Day in 2000, O’Brien credited The Simpsons with "saving" him, a reference to the career slump he was experiencing prior to his hiring for that show. Of the episodes he wrote while there, he considers "Marge vs. the Monorail" to be his favorite.

On April 26, 1993, Lorne Michaels chose O’Brien to be David Letterman's replacement as host of Late Night with David Letterman (with Andy Richter as his sidekick), and the show's name was changed to Late Night with Conan O’Brien. It received generally unfavorable critical reviews for the first 2-3 years after its debut. Indeed, the show was reportedly cancelled by network executives, but was allowed to remain on a day-to-day basis when it was realized there was no programming available to replace it.

Since then, however, O’Brien and the Late Night writing team have consistently been nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series, though they have not won as of 2005. In 1997, 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004 he and the Late Night writing staff won the Writers Guild Award for Best Writing in a Comedy/Variety Series.

In the 2003-04 television season, Late Night with Conan O’Brien averaged 2.5 million viewers each week, easily beating out every other show in its time slot.

In addition, O’Brien currently heads Conaco, a production partnership with NBC to develop programming for the network. Its first venture, the reality show Lost, debuted in fall of 2001.

On September 27, 2004, NBC announced the planned 2009 retirement of Tonight Show host Jay Leno. O’Brien was named Leno's successor, following in the footsteps of Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson.

O’Brien's style

• Clasps his hands during his monologue, between setup and punchline
• Often knocks over his desk microphone (on purpose)
• His sketches sometimes have a surreal tone
• Makes extensive use of chromakey, puppetry, and cheap-looking models pulled by threads
• Sometimes switches into a silly voice or affectation and back again, similarly to Robin Williams but not so manic
• Often jokes that his show is underfunded and unpopular due to its late time slot when it is, in fact, highly successful
• Often moves outside the camera frame or very close to the camera during his monologue
• Often hops around like a bunny
• Often manipulates his pompadour
• Often makes fun of his red hair and large head
• Always does a hop and gesture with the band at the beginning of his show
• Almost always comments on the audiences' applause before his monologue
• Often makes fun of Kirstie Alley and Ruben Studdard for being overweight. Paris Hilton and Michael Jackson also make easy targets for him
• Performs the string dance at the request of guests on his show, and sometimes on his own

Quotes

• "As for O’Brien, the young man is a living collage of annoying nervous habits. He giggles and titters, jiggles about and fiddles with his cuffs. He has dark, beady little eyes like a rabbit. He's one of the whitest white men ever." – Tom Shales, The Washington Post

• "Somehow, Conan O’Brien has transformed himself into the brightest star in the Late Night firmament. His comedy is the gold standard and Conan himself is not only the quickest and most inventive wit of his generation, but quite possibly the greatest host ever." – Conan O’Brien, 2000 Harvard Commencement Speech

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